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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28650174">someone saved my life tonight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED'>formerly_known_as___REDACTED</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Stand (TV 2020), The Stand - Stephen King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Almost Kiss, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Bisexual Female Character, Character Death, Chubby Female Character, Crying, Dream Sequences, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Female Reader, Graphic Description, Gun Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Physical Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Murder, My First Work in This Fandom, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Second Person, Premature Ejaculation, Present Tense, Reader-Insert, References to bullying, Set in 2020, Sexual Tension, Spooning, Telepathic Bond, The Shine Has Entered the Chat, Trauma, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Vaginal Sex, Visions, Visions in dreams, Work In Progress, cigarette burns, references to rape, the opposite of slow burn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 13:42:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>28,625</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28650174</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Oh Jesus Lord they’re all dead, </i>all<i> of them, Jesus, how could that happen, I’m---</i></p><p>You look around, gaze darting everywhere, and work yourself up onto your feet.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harold Lauder/Reader</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. took down a whole alpha</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Garvey’s full of leering, he’s getting ready to stuff his dick in New Girl’s face---making a big ol’ performance out of it, just like his whole deal with getting on top of Skinny Guy and grunting sweet nothings into his ear like a low-rent prison bull---and that’s why he doesn’t hear the engine.</p>
<p>But machine-made noise sticks out long before a vehicle shows even a glint on the horizon and you wonder if he’s full of himself, if he’s gotten overconfident, after all he killed the biker you were traveling with---though back then, there was none of this WWE, king of the mountain, lemme-challenge-you-to-a-duel crap; he waited in ambush like a coward, blew Gordon’s head off with a shotgun.</p>
<p><em>Took down a whole alpha</em>, he crooned.</p>
<p>You shudder.</p>
<p>Besides, that’s how Garvey even figured out New Girl was a thing: he heard their bikes from miles away, heard them stop for the night, and after he herded all of you into a farmhouse and chained you to a pipe in the kitchen he climbed up to the roof with a telescope where he could watch their campfires spark to life.</p>
<p>He’s too focused. Too soft.</p>
<p>Garvey’s hand is shaking, you’re close enough to see it.</p>
<p>All hyped up on the picture he’s gonna make, he’s too busy jazzing on his Mad Max <em>mise en scène</em>.</p>
<p>But his attention isn’t the only soft thing; his dick won’t stiffen, he’s sort of jiggling the front of his pants around like the friction might jolt it out of its afternoon nap, and maybe <em>that’s</em> the thing that’s got him hypnotized: he wants to man up, show off by raping this girl in the mouth but her guy won’t watch.</p>
<p>He can’t.</p>
<p>Skinny Guy’s all curled up, a bag of folded-up bones and tousled hair, a skinny puppy beat down and snot-faced and shivering and left in a heap on the pavement to whine.</p>
<p>You shift numb knees until the feeling comes back in your feet.</p>
<p>You dare a quick glance at Blondie and Latina; they’re tired, looking at each other.</p>
<p>You glance at New Girl, who is recoiling but fighting her own body and squirming and throwing quick darting looks around Garvey’s thighs like an animal would.</p>
<p>The noise finally gets through. That brazen motor growl jolts him out of his trance and he gives up on his cock and jacks the swagger all the way up, swings himself around by the hips; he grunts, he’s a fucking gorilla in lounge pants, he’s lumbering and sneering at the first glimpse of an oncoming vehicle.</p>
<p>He paws his gun out of its holster. He walks out to meet it like the bullet holes opening up on the trailer behind him aren’t real.</p>
<p><em>It’s always like he’s in a movie</em>, you think, watching him, disgusted; <em>like these are effects, all for a video he’ll post later---following some judicious editing, of course---onto his Call of Duty slash cuck fantasy themed OnlyFans account</em>.</p>
<p>Garvey shoots out a tire, skids the oncoming SUV into a wide-tipping curve.</p>
<p>You imagine the swelling movie music happening inside his head.</p>
<p>The guys in the SUV weather the crash just fine. The doors open and they slither out, dash around behind it. They fire through the windows, use the metal flanks like shields. One of them clips Garvey in the elbow and drops of blood scatter, stain the white skin a lurid shade of red.</p>
<p>He glances at it, throws his head back. Bares his yellow horse teeth. Laughs.</p>
<p>Furtive movement flutters in your periphery and you glance toward it in time to see New Girl scuttling off to one side of the road.</p>
<p>A shot clips him below the knee. His arms fly up. He staggers, the thigh muscles buckling. He claps a hand over the wound. He glares at the flipped SUV. Roars.</p>
<p><em>That’s not pain</em>. A leg-loosening dump of adrenaline ices your stomach and everything brightens, pulls into sharper focus. <em>That’s rage</em>.</p>
<p>Your spine jerks, twists, flops you down onto knees and forearms. Your mouth dries out. You flatten onto your belly. Garvey’s body stiffens. Blood hammers in your temples. You slither backward underneath the big trailer in the same instant he whirls around, levels his gun at New Girl. He takes aim.</p>
<p>You crouch down into the asphalt, hug your head, shake all over.</p>
<p>He fires. In the titanic post-apocalyptic silence, it makes an unconvincing sound; it’s flat, dull, something like a corn kernel popping. New Girl’s body twitches and her hands fly up and the bullet finds her eye, plows a tight red hole through her eye socket.</p>
<p>You cry out.</p>
<p>A thick red cloud blows up the back of her reddish hair and you clap a hand over your mouth. The momentum carries her backward; it’s not enough to topple her over and she slumps sideways, her blood darkening the gravel shoulder of the road.</p>
<p>Your palm slicks up with cold sweat.</p>
<p>Latina springs off the ground and lunges---you think her name is Dayna, but you’re not sure; Garvey’s been drugging all of you so hard at night that there’s been little opportunity for conversation---knocks him off balance, grapples with his forearm. His arm swings wide and his finger twitches and another bullet fires off. Blondie’s in the middle of running toward them when the bullet smashes into her face. Her head rocks backward. Teeth and blood go flying.</p>
<p>Your stomach clenches. Your eyes fill with tears. Bile bubbles up into the back of your throat.</p>
<p>Dayna lets loose a gutting screech.</p>
<p>You retch. What’s left of lunch splatters all over the pavement. You cough up long burning strings of snot.</p>
<p>Garvey shoots her in the neck. A thin spray of blood juts upward, pulses, whirls a rain of red drops across the ground.</p>
<p>You scramble backward, jump up, lurch into a run; you turn around and your leg joints are too loose, your muscles jerking like marionette strings. You dodge parked cars and the world jiggles and bobs.</p>
<p>Behind you, an overlapping volley of gunshots.</p>
<p>You throw a glance over your shoulder and slam full-speed into the front bumper of a school bus, bounce off it; a pulsing too-bright white tightens around your vision. Fresh pain bursts behind your sternum. You stagger, caught in a wobbling momentum, gasp all the air out of your lungs; your fingers clutch the corner of the bus but your hips keep pivoting and your feet tangle together.</p>
<p>You lose your balance, drop down square on your ass.</p>
<p>Stars explode across your vision.</p>
<p>Your lungs struggle against the seal in your pipes. Everything tilts sideways.</p>
<p>You punch yourself in the chest. A hot humming pain rolls down your arms, explodes through your lungs; your throat pops open and your body convulses, pulls in a huge frantic grasping breath. The dizziness recedes. Your ears fill with the hollow machine-gun rhythm of your heart.</p>
<p>You close your eyes, let your mouth hang open.</p>
<p>You lean up against the bus’s tire and your sore back mutters. Then other pains speak up, add to the overall chorus of complaints in your body: your aggravated tailbone, the light sting where your jeans ripped apart at the seat and gravel scraped into your skin, the bruises forming over your knees where they struck the bus, the stiffness of muscles at the mercy of too much adrenaline.</p>
<p>Then...</p>
<p>Silence.</p>
<p>It fills in the spaces left by your slowing breath.</p>
<p>You open your eyes. Shadows stretch long around you, reach across the ground. The sun’s weak yellowing light is dim with haze.</p>
<p>The cuffs rattle. You look at them, lift your forearms; the right is on looser than the left, it might bruise or break the skin but it looks loose enough to fit up over the fattest part of your hand.</p>
<p><em>God bless laziness, or overconfidence, or just plain-old rockbottom jailhouse miracles</em>.</p>
<p>You shake the daze out of your fingers, grasp the loose cuff; your fingers are weak and oily with sweat, your grip slips. So you push. The cuff grinds your bones together and you hiss in breath. It sticks around the base of your thumb and you try twisting it; the blunt edge gouges the skin, wells up a thin red slick. You grit your teeth. The metal skids across the blood. The cuff pops off. You close your eyes, catch your breath. Press the wound against your shirt.</p>
<p>You listen.</p>
<p>Your heart’s slowed down and you can discern bird calls and insects buzzing and underbrush rustlings and faint animal cries drifting down the road from a great distance and the sigh of a barely-there wind excusing itself through the pines.</p>
<p><em>The SUV must’ve taken too much damage and that’s what killed the motor</em>.</p>
<p>You open your eyes. Hold your breath.</p>
<p>Listen.</p>
<p>Your belly tightens up at the uncontested silence.</p>
<p><em>Oh Jesus Lord they’re all dead,</em> all <em>of them, Jesus, how could that happen, I’m</em>---</p>
<p>You look around, gaze darting everywhere, and work yourself up onto your feet.</p>
<p>
  <em>God---the SUV guys too?</em>
</p>
<p>You limp through the stalled cars, touch them; you lean your weight into your right hand and guide yourself forward. Through the gap beneath Garvey’s trailer, you glimpse vast splatters of blood on the road, pools of darkening with their continuous exposure to oxygen.</p>
<p><em>That’s Garvey’s body---I</em> hope <em>it is, I</em> hope <em>that he’s dead, I don’t see any movement or hear any breath and what’s left of his head’s nursing a pretty big pool of blood---and there’s Dayna next to Blondie’s body, her hair a blood-soaked pile; wish I knew Blondie’s name for sure, I know she was Dayna’s friend, but trauma stole her voice.</em></p>
<p>You wince your way around the turned cab, hobbling along, easing air out through your mouth.</p>
<p>Over the soft trailing wind and clusters of bird calls you hear muted choppy breaths and chattering teeth, clothes rustling, thick rubber soles knocking together, the soft whimpering of a male voice gone nasal with terror.</p>
<p><em>Skinny Guy, he's still alive</em>. You blow out a long breath. <em>Thank God for fucked-up miracles, too</em>.</p>
<p>You look past Skinny Guy’s curled-up and shivering self to study the body of the SUV. It’s turned over on its side, a long blue paint scrape marking its trajectory; you stand still, stare at it, feel as though you should remember the squeal of metal and the sparks but bits of the evening's events are already retreating behind flickering blank spaces in your memory.</p>
<p>In front of the tipped SUV is a sprawling pair of prone bodies, both big, both male, good Ole Boy types it looks like, big and pink and white. Both of them died holding on to their rifles, and at least one of them was a crack shot; together they managed to take a few good chunks out of Garvey before dropping him.</p>
<p><em>They were going for harm reduction instead of murder</em>. You study the bloody wounds in Garvey’s thighs, the clipped elbows, the pulpy mess made out of one shoulder. <em>But the crazy fucker just kept shooting.</em></p>
<p>You move closer to Garvey's body. He’s face-down too, his legs spread wide, the crown of his head a ruin.</p>
<p><em>I guess there’s no compensating for the kind of crazy that decides if he can’t have all the women left in the world he’s gonna take them with him---and he</em> would<em>, that’s</em> exactly <em>what he’d do---he’d feel himself god-king of the apocalypse, ruler of this new world, with every right to take his wives and mistresses with him to the afterworld.</em></p>
<p>He smells like blood, gunpowder, unwashed gym clothes smeared with shit. You squat, feel through his pockets for the handcuff keys; you work up as much snot and saliva as you can. You yank the keys out, loosen the cuff, take it off. You spit at his head, fling the cuff at the trailer. Your spit lands on his ear with a meaty splat. The cuff clangs off the trailer’s metal skin.</p>
<p>“Fuck you.” All the strength’s been scraped out of your voice. “Wish I coulda killed you myself." You pause for breath. "You misogynistic sadistic fucking fuck."</p>
<p>Skinny Guy’s still curled up in the no-man’s land of the road, his teeth clicking off one another like he’s feverish, making muffled small animal noises, his breath bubbling up through a nose full of snot.</p>
<p>You go to him, your feet scraping the ground, your cuff-wounded hand tight against your belly.</p>
<p>He covers his head with his arms.</p>
<p>You start to kneel and lose your balance; one of your knees strikes the pavement near his back. Pain explodes behind your kneecap.</p>
<p>You suck in a sharp breath.</p>
<p>He flinches.</p>
<p>You touch the space between his shoulder blades and he stiffens up, squeals; you yank your hand back.</p>
<p>You try to speak and your throat sticks together. You start coughing. For a spasm of seconds, your nausea doubles up and you brace a hand against the pavement, bend over, gag out a long torso-wrenching string of dry coughs.</p>
<p>
  <em>All right…all right.</em>
</p>
<p>You crawl closer, sit on your heels.</p>
<p>
  <em>Let’s try this.</em>
</p>
<p>You lean over onto your hip, lie down on your side. He curls up tighter and you tuck your knees up behind his, mold yourself around the bent shape of his body and hug his arms and his shivering bones shake yours and you <em>shhhhhh</em> because you don’t need your voice for that.</p>
<p>He whimpers.</p>
<p>You creep one hand toward a straining wrist, find his hands. They’re wrapped around each other and writhing together, his lungs still shuddering, rawboned fingers enfolding one another, his big knuckles popping; you rub the back of one wrist with your thumb and <em>shhhhh</em> again, warm his hair with your breath.</p>
<p>His chest hitches.</p>
<p>The ground is chilly. Your hip aches. Your shoulder’s getting numb but a soft drowsy heat builds up. You cover his hands with one of yours, rub his knuckles, bring your mouth against his nape: <em>shhhhhh</em>.</p>
<p>His knees pull in, touch his chest. His spine folds over; he’s so thin that you can feel each knob of spine through his thin coat, the back blades of his pelvis, the way his shoulders shiver, his feet rubbing together like a little boy’s searching for sleep.</p>
<p>You rub slow heat into his upper arm: <em>shhhhhh</em>.</p>
<p>His body jerks.</p>
<p>You stroke the hair off his forehead and his breath snags, flutters.</p>
<p>“It’s okay,” you whisper.</p>
<p>He starts to cry.</p>
<p><em>Shhhhhhh</em>.</p>
<p>“Is...i-is she…” He gulps and his voice is high-pitched, wavering. “Dead?”</p>
<p>You nod. “Yes.”</p>
<p>He wails and you grab his restless hands, squeeze them; you press your forehead into the back of his neck. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.</p>
<p>His body goes limp. He moans, the agony of it flaying his voice. Sobs rip their way into his breath. He starts to hiccup.</p>
<p>“We should bury her before it gets too dark,” you whisper.</p>
<p>“I-I-I…” He hyperventilates, the cords in his throat stuttering. “I-I’m---”</p>
<p>“Shhhhhhh.” You hold him tight, put your mouth in his hair. “Shhhhhh,” you whisper to his sweaty, greasy skin. “It’s okay to cry.”</p>
<p>He rolls away from you and crawls his hand up the pavement, turns his face toward the road. He begins to weep.</p>
<p>“It’s okay.” You rub his back. You look toward the side of the road and the light is fading, the air bluing. “We can just stay here, it’s fine.”</p>
<p>“You’re right.” His voice is worn out, tremulous. “We shouldn’t…” He shakes his head. “I-I <em>can’t</em>,” he whispers.</p>
<p>“Okay,” you murmur.</p>
<p>The hand on the pavement curls into a fist. “I can’t leave her like this.”</p>
<p>Tears slide down your cheeks. “Okay.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. carrying gravedigger's tools</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Turns out that burying a body is just a notion when you don’t have the right equipment for it.</p>
<p>“I dunno how we can.” You shake your head, look around. “There is no busting through this kinda sod without at least a spade.”</p>
<p>
  <em>Following a long slow slide of time, he unfolded up onto his feet. He swayed there. Looked around, his face dazed and vacant.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>You stood, went to him.</em>
</p>
<p>You’re in the middle of a roadside field. The grass is knee-high and halfway through to yellowing, its roots interlaced thick and tight.</p>
<p>
  <em>The gentle wind calmed enough to smell the aging blood, the drying vomit. You stood next to him and tried to put a hand on his shoulder but he dropped it out from underneath your touch.</em>
</p>
<p>You’ve got your back to the west. The sun’s fallen lower into the sky and the white haze of clouds between it and you is beginning its descent into a gold-glazed pink flush. Your shadow, a comically thin and ashen and gangling ghost, climbs the front of his body.</p>
<p>
  <em>You asked him his name.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Harold.” He stepped away from you. “Harold Lauder.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>You nodded and told him yours and you got a memory-flash of the chestnut-haired girl he was with; you recalled her at the precise moment of her death and your stomach dropped, your heart kicking into high gear, and you moved closer to him. Lowered your voice. Asked him her name.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>He glanced at the half-flung discarded shape her body made on the pavement, what the new shadows were doing to her white and slackened face, and he drew in a raggedy breath. He hung his head, pressed his lips into a tight line.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Frannie. Uh...Fran.” He cleared his throat, made his voice strong. He glanced at you. “Her name was Francis Goldsmith.”</em>
</p>
<p>Between you, rolled up tight in a green cotton blanket and secured with rope, her body.</p>
<p>“There’s, uh…” Harold shifts his weight from one side to the other. “Um...well, I was thinking…” He hugs himself and glances at your face like he wants to look at it longer, like he might smile, but can’t control his jittery gaze. “A-A stone wall?”</p>
<p>You move toward the edge of the road and shade your eyes, scan the field’s perimeter.</p>
<p>“It’s in the back of the field?” Harold half-turns and unfolds one long shaking arm, points.</p>
<p>You follow his arm with your gaze, search the ragged forest’s edge until your eyes snag on a spill of graying rocks. Overhung by spindly pine branches, tucked underneath dappled shade, it’s all the way across the grass, close to the silvered skeleton of a falling-down barn.</p>
<p>“If you…if you want to help me.” He glances at your eyes and shrugs a shoulder, his mouth twitching in and out of a small smile. “I thought maybe we could cover her up with stones instead?”</p>
<p>“Harold!” You blink at him, startled into a huge grin. “That’s a <em>great</em> idea!”</p>
<p>His bony face flushes. He tilts his head and lets his arms drop, flashes a hesitant but toothy smile. “You really think so?”</p>
<p>“Yeah!” You look toward the barn. “I wish I’d thought of it first thing because...well, you’re right.” You shrug, hook loose hair behind your ears. “It’s getting dark and it’s not like either of us---<em>any</em> of us---are carrying gravedigger’s tools.” You look at him over your shoulder and grin. “Even if maybe we should be.”</p>
<p>“Okay.” He nods. He’s still pink. He won’t look you full in the face. “Let’s go, then...because you’re right, too. We’re running out of daylight pretty fast.”</p>
<p>Hauling Frannie’s body all the way across the field is silent, sweaty work. Your heart pounds in your ears and your hands ache and your upper arms tremble and once you trip over a thick tuft of grass and drop her feet and Harold, walking backward, loses his balance too; his grip slips off her shoulders and he staggers back, his body lunging sideways, his arms spinning.</p>
<p>You regain your footing, take a wobbly step. You trip over her legs.</p>
<p>“Shit,” he gasps. “Are you okay?”</p>
<p>“I’m just a fucking klutz.” You let out a loud jagged laugh and crawl away, push yourself back up on your feet. You brush dirt and loose grass off your clothes. You shake your head, breathe hard. “Don’t mind me.”</p>
<p>“You’ve got, uh...a big hole in your jeans.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, I know.” You reach back, slap where the seam split in the seat. You tilt your head at the road. “This happened back there, though.”</p>
<p>Harold’s voice softens. “But it looks like...you’re bleeding?”</p>
<p>“Maybe.” You reach back and feel around, find a stripe of bared buttock skin. “I was bleeding before, I know that.” Your fingertips find what might be bits of embedded road-grit or a rash of scabs. “There are probably still stains? Could that be what you’re seeing?”</p>
<p>“Maybe.” His face is red. He nods and it’s too quick, brusque. He tilts his head, quirks his mouth. “Probably.” He hurries back over to Frannie’s shoulders. “I guess.”</p>
<p>“Well...I’m pretty sure that’s the least of my worries, at least right now,” you pant, hoisting Frannie’s wrapped-up feet. “There are more important things.”</p>
<p>Harold nods and blinks. His hair falls into his face. His head bobs up and down. “Yeah.”</p>
<p>You wrestle her body the rest of the way across the field and it’s sweaty, terrible, exacting work. Your body wobbles. Your muscles are on fire.</p>
<p>The wind blows through the pines and it smells fresh, tangy; there might be water somewhere near, the air holds a scent of leaf-stained creek water underneath an odor of dark earth and pine pitch and dropped needles---<em>it’s amazing how clean things are in the wake of stilled engines and empty oil fields and dead smokestacks</em>, you think, <em>with no more home fires burning anywhere, industry dead, discarded cars cluttering the roads</em>.</p>
<p>The pink in the sky goes to orange, darkens into a burning red line along the horizon.</p>
<p>“Here.” Harold breathes hard, glances around. His voice is thin. “I think here is good.”</p>
<p>You nod. “Okay.”</p>
<p>Harold looks over his shoulder, backs his way into a root-ridged clearing. He’s panting, tiny pinecones crunching beneath his feet; it’s cold enough for his breath to form thin bursting clouds.</p>
<p>He squats. His upper lip trembles away from his teeth. He grunts. The cords in his neck pop out; his heels dig in. He lays Frannie’s wrapped head and shoulders underneath the drooping hemlock pine branches, on needle-fragrant ground.</p>
<p>You squat too, ease her feet down.</p>
<p>The steady rhythm of his breath shimmies apart, like he’s trying not to cry.</p>
<p>You press your lips together and breathe out and go to the wall, tug a head-sized rock free.</p>
<p>The light withdraws through the canopy, leaving the woods dark and deep---somewhere within mourning doves offer their soft lament to the end of the day while squirrels screech at your sudden intrusion from overhead branches.</p>
<p>You arrange your arms to take the stone’s weight.</p>
<p>Harold’s crying but it’s soft and weak, muffled, naked, pitiful.</p>
<p>You don’t look at him. You hold still, breathe. Close your eyes. The sound of his unraveled breath crawls beneath your skin; the maddening softness of his whimpers, the waiting shudder held inside them, twitches up your spine. You stare into the woods, fight back tears.</p>
<p>Behind you, the ground crunches beneath his feet. His breath collapses, reorients itself. He brushes his hands on the thighs of his jeans. He sniffles. He mouth-breathes, wipes his juicy nose.</p>
<p>“I lost my girlfriend, too.” It bursts out of you in a breathy, trembling rush and you turn around. “It wasn’t anything like this, nothing so abrupt...o-or dramatic...or traumatic.”</p>
<p>His arms hang at his sides, his shoulders pushed back, his spine off-center. His hair’s a sweat-soaked mess. He looks down.</p>
<p>“I mean, she died of the Trips, like...” Your fingers struggle to reset their grip on the stone, your forearms straining at the weight. “Well...like everyone else, I guess.”</p>
<p>His fingers curl. He looks up and his eyes are red, his cheeks tear-streaked and gleaming wet.</p>
<p>“But…” Hollow laughter shakes its way into your breathless voice. You search his eyes, wish you could smile. “It still sucked.”</p>
<p>“She, uh…” Harold gulps. “Wasn’t.” He shakes his head, cuts his eyes away.“My girlfriend.” He runs a hand through his sweaty hair. “I…wanted her to be...but.” His eyebrows lift and he shrugs, blows out a breath. “We knew each other.”</p>
<p>“Oh.”</p>
<p>“You know what I mean.” He rolls his shoulders, shakes himself out of his stillness; he brushes past you, strides over to the wall. “From before,” he half-mutters.</p>
<p>“I had to bury her, too.” You lug your stone over to Frannie’s feet and squat. “There was no one left and our apartment building had a courtyard, so…” You set it in place and catch your breath, use the back of your forearm to wipe the thick sweat off your hairline. “That’s where I did it.”</p>
<p>“If it’s all the same, I really don’t want to talk about this.” His voice is light and brittle. Harold hurries over with his uneven stride, a rock curled under each arm. “Not right now.” His words are clipped. “We don’t exactly have the time.”</p>
<p>“Wh---” It stings and your mouth opens. “It is <em>not</em> all the same, as a matter of fact.” You stand, rub the sweat off your palms. Your body deflates. “I was trying to make you feel better.”</p>
<p>“Well…” He says it through gritted teeth and drops the rocks, shoves them into place. “Don’t.”</p>
<p>“Wow.” Blood throbs into your face and your stomach drops, leaves a gut-lurch in its trembling wake. A hot edge creeps into your voice. “You know, Harold, you could always go fuck yourself.”</p>
<p>“I guess I could.” He shakes a spill of hair out of his eyes. He glances up at you and his smile is thin, crooked. He stands, brushes his hands on his thighs. He sweetens his voice. “But I don’t have time for that, either.”</p>
<p>“Well…” You step back and your arms, squeeze the raw ache in your chest. “You certainly don’t have any problem finding the time to be a real fucking asshole, do you?”</p>
<p>“Well.” His smile turns to a slanted blade and he tilts his head. “If it helps,” he says, fluttering his eyelashes, his voice hardening until it cracks, “you could just think of it as one of the many, many, many services I provide.”</p>
<p>The fragile smugness in his tone launches your hands and they slam into his bony shoulders.</p>
<p>Harold’s wide-eyed startle shatters the smirk off his face; his eyes search your face. His face settles into stone.</p>
<p>Your legs shake. Your heart pounds. “What is your problem?”</p>
<p>His eyes widen and he raises his voice; he wants to growl, but he can’t quite catch the strength. “<em>You</em>!”</p>
<p>You flinch and keep your mouth tight, your hands at your sides. Your eyebrows go up. “Me?”</p>
<p>“You.” He narrows his eyes, takes a lunging step forward; the space between his top lip and his nose flushes red. “Y-You…” He sputters. “You <em>spooned</em> me!”</p>
<p>You hold your ground.</p>
<p>“I tried to <em>comfort</em> you!” You keep your eyes on his face and your fists clenched. “A-And…” You raise your voice, get up on tiptoe. “And it <em>worked</em>, I will remind you!”</p>
<p>Harold’s mouth opens; his face changes like he wants to speak but he just stands there, still leaning, eyes still searching your face. He licks his lips. His nostrils twitch.</p>
<p>You slide a foot back, glance at his mouth and a flash of adrenaline stops your breath. It makes you tremble, ignites an all-consuming rush of heat.</p>
<p>He steps closer, lowers his voice. “Why did you---”</p>
<p>You breathe faster. “It needed to be done.”</p>
<p>You lick your lips and his eyes flicker toward your mouth.</p>
<p>“But---”</p>
<p>The leading edge of his breath puffs into your face. It smells like a hint of iced tea, the smoky tang of mouth sweat, a damp odor of spices and meat---your mouth fills with a warm gush of spit---and you swallow. Your eyes track the hovering of his mouth.</p>
<p>His breathing quickens.</p>
<p>Your skin can’t bear the light touch of the wind, it tingles at the stirring of your own hair; his foot moves forward and yours moves back and you hold your upper body still while a long sigh of lazy gooseflesh waltzes down your nape. It turns your joints to water.</p>
<p>You look up, hold his gaze.</p>
<p>He looks down, won’t look away.</p>
<p>Your breathing deepens and his hitches, starts to slow; both of you freeze, like cornered animals do.</p>
<p>There’s a subtle shift in his expression. His jaw slides out of its clench and he breathes when you breathe; you take a long slow shaky breath and his chest lifts with yours. The corners of his mouth hesitate and he slow-blinks and you let your breath slide out, your chest dropping in tandem with his.</p>
<p>“You gonna…” You cough the huskiness out of your voice. “You gonna hit me, Lauder?”</p>
<p>He flinches and blinks, shakes his head; a bright flush creeps down his chin. It forms ruddy blotches on his throat, nestles between his collarbones. “No,” he murmurs, his eyes following the shapes your lips make. “Of course not.”</p>
<p>Light-headed and a little dizzy, you close your eyes.</p>
<p>Your mouth opens.</p>
<p>His breath touches your lips.</p>
<p>“You should...” You straighten up and turn your head, take an ungainly step back. You pull in an unsteady breath. “Um.”</p>
<p>“Uh.” He shoves his hands into his pockets, hunches his shoulders; he struggles to catch his breath.</p>
<p>“Yeah.” You swallow, hold up a trembling hand. Your heart hammers the cage of your ribs. You look past him. “Okay.”</p>
<p>“Um.” He nods and backs away, his cheeks and lips flushed. A stringy curtain of hair hangs across one side of his face. He won’t look at you. “Uh huh.”</p>
<p>“You should probably finish this alone,” you half-whisper.</p>
<p>“Yes.” He nods, says it too fast; he shifts from foot to foot, his tone abrupt but subdued. “You’re right, I…” His voice drops to a threadbare whisper. “Probably should.”</p>
<p>“I’ll wait…” You turn your back on him. You let out a deflating breath, rub your face with both hands. “I...I don’t know where, but...”</p>
<p>Harold clears his throat. He says your name.</p>
<p>You spin around, almost trip over your own feet.</p>
<p>The smile stutters on and off his face. “Thank you.”</p>
<p>You blush and look down, tuck hair behind one ear. “I’ll wait for you by the road,” you whisper.</p>
<p>His voice is raw but soft. “Okay.”</p>
<p>“Uh…” Your head comes up and you lean like you want to take a step. “You have your flashlight, right?”</p>
<p>He nods, smiles a little. He tucks hair behind his ears. “Yeah.”</p>
<p>“All right.” You nod, turn back around. “Okay,” you murmur.</p>
<p>The field ahead of you seems vast---<em>how did I---how did</em> we---<em>carry a body this far</em>? You start to walk. Enough light has receded to leave the far eastern horizon in full dark; the sky is hazy but it’s thin as a white veil, over there the stars are brightening out of the black and putting on little moisture-halos and this ground is so much bumpier than you remember and every uneven step jostles your chest tighter and tighter and tighter until you yearn to gasp.</p>
<p>With only nature sounds to compete with, it’s easy to hear him pull rocks loose and let some of them fall and his heavy jangling footfalls going back and forth, the steady chugging thrum of his respiration like he’s an engine that groans when it has to slow down, and you’re gentle with yourself. You slow your feet, you breathe through your nose. You hold your arms out for balance. You keep your eyes on the ground. You don’t look too far ahead. You count to three.</p>
<p>You hold the urge to run at arm’s length.</p>
<p>You keep the urge to turn back around close to the vest.</p>
<p>
  <em>Leave him alone.</em>
</p>
<p>You do it.</p>
<p>
  <em>Let him finish.</em>
</p>
<p>You go all the way to the edge of the road.</p>
<p>You sit.</p>
<p>Wait.</p>
<p>Oh, but it hurts.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>you might find spoilers in the comments, so...proceed with caution</p>
<p>XO</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. eulogy for an open grave</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Full night comes and settles over the land.</p><p>You glance up at the sky; the moon’s swollen just past its first quarter, its bright silver light netted in thickening wisps of cloud. Cold illumination filters through but it’s not much. It sketches the barest outlines of things, settles into the pits of hollow places like a scrim of glittering frost.</p><p>You get up, leave the roadside.</p><p>The flashlight blinds you when you turn it on, makes the night even blacker. You pick your way down through the ditch, climb up to the backside of the turned-over of the SUV. You scrounge a blanket, some water, a handgun, an armload of other things out of the back. Without the sun to temper it, what started out as a bracing evening chill has evolved into skin-gnawing cold.</p><p>You set the stuff down, wrap the blanket around yourself. It’s wool, thick and scratchy, one of those Pendleton Native design blankets.</p><p><em>It smells like a grandfather’s living room</em>, you think, putting your nose in it: there’s a lingering odor of tobacco smoke from hand-rolled cigarettes, traces of an out-of-vogue aftershave, dog fur, beer stains, tomato sauce, a trace of marijuana smoke, the pungent camphor of muscle rub.</p><p><em>This is all that’s left of someone’s life</em>. You pull the blanket up over your head like a hood, hold it closed. <em>It’s too easy to fill in the blanks, to imagine the last time an old man sat in a rocking chair with this blanket, a dog sleeping in his lap, his can of beer slipping out of his hand just enough to foam onto the bright zigzag patterns</em>.</p><p>You make a small fire behind the SUV. It’s just sticks and deadwood, it’s just a ring of rocks carried out of the ditch; it isn’t good for cooking or for warming more than your hands, but it makes a light that doesn’t run on batteries.</p><p><em>And if Pendleton Man is lucky he was buried, someone survived him long enough to honor him with that kindness; or perhaps his survivors dispatched his body pyre-style, one last glorious burst of energy and light---like a Viking, or how certain Native American tribes do, or the storied kings of old---turned out of illness-ridden flesh and forced to light up a long night</em>.</p><p>The overhead haze thickens into fog. You feed more sticks into your tiny fire, watch the flames gobble them up. The light breeze puffing against your face turns damp.</p><p>Footsteps fade in from a distance. Stalks of grass whisper together, rip themselves free of the ground. A regular rhythm of breath rolls along, rough and gusting, like a ripple of wind-bent sails.</p><p>Your head turns.</p><p>“Harold?”</p><p>The handgun’s on the ground beside your hip.</p><p>“Yeah.” He crashes his way down through the ditch. “It’s me.”</p><p>“Okay.” Your spine softens. Your cheeks get warm. “Good.”</p><p>He climbs up onto the road. “Were you worried?”</p><p>You nod. “Yeah.”</p><p>He moves into the fire’s raggedy circle of thin orange light.</p><p>“I…” You look up, watch him. “I guess I wasn’t sure if it was you?”</p><p>“It’s me.” His smile is a brief mellow curve. “Sorry for the time, it…” He takes a seat on the opposite side of the fire. “Took quite a bit longer than I thought it would.”</p><p>“I’m worried about the weather,” you blurt out, your scalp getting hot, “the fog’s getting thicker, it has been all evening, and it smells like it’s going to rain.”</p><p>His eyebrows go up. “Oh?”</p><p>“Garvey---that’s the nasty dude who had us---he drove us around in a Range Rover, and it’s like...not even a quarter mile away from here, and we can walk it easy. Even in this dark.”</p><p>He grabs a bottle of water, spins off the cap. “You think there’s enough room to sleep in the back?”</p><p>“No, no, no…” You shake your head. “It’s not that, there’s a farmhouse, it’s like...five or six miles from here, it’s where we were holed up waiting…”</p><p>The blood drains out of his cheeks.</p><p>“Uh...waiting for you, we were waiting for you, he had a telescope…”</p><p>He blinks several times, his nostrils flaring. He looks away and his lips press into a line.</p><p>“Oh shit, Harold.” You lean forward, hesitate; his eyes drop to the hand still in your lap and you sigh through your nose, pull it back into the blanket. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>He won’t look at you. “How long was he tracking us for?”</p><p>“A couple days?” You look down, wrap the blanket tighter around yourself. “I think?”</p><p>There’s a sharp inhale. He puts the water down.</p><p>“But…” You lift your face and your voice is soft. “But it’s a good place to wait out rain, a clean place, there aren’t any bodies…it looks like the family bugged out at the last minute, or something? I don’t know.” You watch his face. “They left half their shit strewn everywhere.”</p><p>“This fire’s gonna burn out if you don’t feed it.”</p><p>You blink, pull back.</p><p>“I’m just saying.”</p><p>You drop your eyes, stare into the tiny ring of ditch-stones where the flames have guttered all the way down---it’s more spark than light, twigs and grass shriveling into bright filaments. Your face gets hot.</p><p>Harold’s voice cuts into your name. It makes you flinch and you skip a breath and a raw ache squeezes your lungs, like a wound opening a bruise; the pressure behind it squeezes your throat shut.</p><p>“Are…” He swallows and it sounds like the clench of a wet fist. “What’s...uh.” He clears his throat. His breath flutters in his mouth like moth wings. “Um.”</p><p>You hug yourself and the wool retains your rising body heat, makes you sweat. Your nostrils flood with snot. Your lips tremble. Your eyes sting.</p><p>“I...don’t.” He fidgets. “I’m sorry, I…” His voice is small and soft and panicked. “D-Don’t know...what you want.”</p><p>What’s left of your fire spins out of focus, goes blurry. Your belly clenches your breath into a harsh gasp. Tears drip off your chin.</p><p>“Please!”</p><p>It comes out raw and tentative and so heated that it jolts you into looking up at him; the weakening light covers his face, deepens his hollows, picks out a gleam in eyes that look angry and terrified and trapped. He looks in your eyes like he’s afraid to blink, his mouth forgotten, the expression on his face undressed by a ruthless vulnerability; but it’s too dark, the sky is too opaque, the shadows too unsteady. The flames have lost all of their kind tones.</p><p>You cut your eyes away, squeeze them shut. “I don’t know,” you whisper.</p><p>All around you lives the too-much silence of what comes after. Even the wind has moved on, there’s just the last crickets of the season and a mutter of secret trickling water lost in the woods and sometimes the new emptiness of the world feels like a solid thing, like it can put hands on you made out of wind and write things in shrieking bird calls and shove your face into the dirt.</p><p>“T-Tell me, I…” He lets his breath run out, moves a hand across his mouth. “I promise, let me…”</p><p>Your chest feels too heavy, too tender, to carry the weight of a breath.</p><p>“Let me try...” His voice weakens to a whisper. “To give it to you.”</p><p>Your skin prickles and twists around your flesh and if you could you’d crawl out of it, yank the stitches out of your sternum and let your ribs fall open like wings and go <em>here, Harold, </em>this <em>is what I want</em>, the wild red desperate thud thud thud of your heart shedding blood and begging him to put his mouth against it like he could lower his voice, could temper his breath, could sweeten his words just enough to out-murmur it.</p><p><em>Protect it from the rest of me with your hands</em>, you think, hunched over your folded arms. A shiver tightens your teeth. <em>Whisper it down</em>.</p><p>His face moves in a way you can’t parse in the dark---you think a rictus or a wince, a silent snarl, a brief flash of wet white teeth---but the dark takes what remains of the fire and blows the conflict in his body up into cinematic proportions; thin shadows flail wherever the light touches.</p><p>The wool irritates your cocoon of gooseflesh, your cheeks hurt and your chest heaves and your guts braid into shivering knots.</p><p>A scrape-crunch of gravel happens between his sudden weight and the ground.</p><p>You clap a hand over your mouth, blurt out a strangled sob.</p><p>His body offends the silence---his bones pop, his jacket rustling loud as curtains, his breath whistling past his teeth and then his lips seal shut, his nostrils holding it back, holding it at the threshold of bolting.</p><p>The fire shrivels up. Its sparks puff away, scatter across the pavement. They take the last of the dim amber light with them.</p><p>Harold kneels in front of you.</p><p>You take your hand off your mouth and through your brimming tears you see the unraveled white outlines of his wrists; you labor against the irregular engine of your lungs, hold your breath, wipe your nose.</p><p>You close your eyes, try to stop shivering.</p><p>You smell fresh sweat on top of old, green salt over bitter smoke; there’s a clinging ghost of lavender fabric softener and a gravestone scent of moss and wet dirt still clinging to his fingers.</p><p>The first light brush of his palms on your cheeks startles your eyes open. You gasp. He takes hold of your face and your neck jerks and he keeps you still, brings his mouth to your forehead. He rests it there. You suck in a sharp breath. </p><p>You open your mouth and he goes <em> shhhhhhh </em>.</p><p>Your mind hollows and for a dark drifting stretch of time, in the space of one slow soft agonizing breath, all you are is prickling skin and rising blood, a tide of heat, a blank red pulp, a stew of words that you can’t find.</p><p><em>Harold</em>.</p><p>His name comes floating out of a deep dark somewhere, caresses your tongue like a blade.</p><p>You release a heavy sigh and he’s all <em>shhhhhhh</em> but forceful with it this time, his chin digging into the immediate twitch between your eyebrows, his hesitant fingers finding your hair and daring to enter. You shiver and your spine twists, each vertebrae popping off, a flood of sparks lighting up your skin. His thumbs rub your temples and your belly clenches, sends a rattling breath skipping up the back of your throat.</p><p><em>Shhhhhh</em> and it’s slowed-down, deliberate.</p><p>He lets go of your face. You struggle to control your breath. With slow thumbs, he wipes the wet off your cheeks; that smell is still all over his hands, forgotten stone and fresh dirt, old moss, years of weather now wetted with salt. It’s strong, floods your nose; when you inhale, it moves across your tongue like a promise of rain.</p><p><em>Graveyard dust</em>, your mind whispers and you get onto your knees. You put your arms around him, close your eyes. <em>For love is as strong as death, and jealousy as cruel as the grave</em>.</p><p>He lets you but at first he won’t move; you cup the back of his head and put your face against his neck. His breath comes hard and fast. He trembles all over in the tightening circle of your arms like a broken bird and each breath comes out of him almost, but not quite, a whimper; you wish you could calm him, you want to, but the slip of his unanchored shoulder blades and his cobbled backbone lead your body down a different road.</p><p>His arms go around you and you whimper, pull the front of your body up tight against him; he’s rock hard but he keeps twitching back, letting the air in between you. He pulls his hips away and you sway forward and the stiff angle of his cock pokes into the softest part of your belly. He sucks in a breath, winces.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he whispers.</p><p>You think <em>shhhhhh</em> and <em>don’t be</em> but instead of words you cup a hand around the back of his neck and kiss the skin beneath his ear. You make it soft, open-mouthed, wet, lingering; his shock is abrupt, galvanic, seismic. He gasps, cries out, it’s wavering and thin, boyish, helpless and a throb of heat slithers down your spine. It thuds in the pit of your belly, thrums your clit, jerks your hips forward.</p><p>His chest heaves and you gush a mouthful of breath. His hands spasm, fingers curling against your back; you move your face against his jaw like an animal would.</p><p>“Y-You,” he half-whispers, swallows. “Don’t have to do th---”</p><p>You kiss his still-moving lips; it’s clumsy but you surge into it, your mouth smothering his, a shaking hand catching the back of his head. His day’s accumulation of salt burns your tongue, his breath shooting out through his nose---he pulls you up against him, squeezes the air out of you, kisses you back with a frenzied devouring mouth. You whimper and his tongue splits your breath, gulps it down; he lets out a long thick wailing moan and the vibration passes through your throat, hums in your ribs, slits your belly. It reaches inside and you grab him by the nape, shove your face into his.</p><p>You lie on your back. </p><p>The ground is cold but the wool blanket’s between you and it and there’s enough of it for both of you to wrap up in. The addition of combined heat, the trapping of your breath and his, cooks its collection of scents out.</p><p>You lift up, unbutton your jeans. You close your eyes as he digs his fingers under the waistband and yanks, works the fatigued denim down past the soft swells of each hip, bites his own breath at the effort. You listen to his moist breath and gentle grunting and the shivering that keeps landing on his skin and taking off again; the fog hits the ground and the sudden smell of your sweaty skin mingles with the blanket, envelops you with the scent of someone’s basement.</p><p>He unlaces your shoes. He tugs them off.</p><p>Your toes curl up at the chill.</p><p>He gets your jeans the rest of the way down and kneels between your bent-open thighs and unzips and strips off his coat, bundles it up. He tucks it behind your head. Crawls over you.</p><p>You unzip his jeans, his breath shaking its way down into your face. You slip your hands just beneath the waistband. He lets his head hang, leaves his mouth open, dumps his hot whimpering breaths into your hair.</p><p>You grip his hipbones. His belly pulls in, takes your thumbs with it.</p><p>You move both hands up underneath the loose t-shirt he’s wearing, slot your fingers into the rising and falling spaces between his ribs and your mind goes <em>spine dips tailbone dimples hip hollows, hollow eyes, collarbone hollows deep enough to drink from</em>---it makes a map of all the shivering bowls of his body---you think <em>he’s shaped out of sharp edges and empty space and bound together out of yearning skin; that’s all there is, it’s a body like the wind moaning its way across a desert</em>.</p><p>At first he can’t get his cock in you in because you’re too wet, you’ve built up too much slick, but he steers with a fist until it slips in and up and you cry out; it burns, stretches, packs your lower belly with a sullen throbbing ache.</p><p>Breath shudders its way out of him.</p><p>You dig your heels in, rock your hips up; he thrusts the rest of the way in, shoves a startled moan up through your nostrils. He rests a forearm beside your head, holds your face. You move against his short hard thrusts and the blanket smells like sunbaked seawater, unwashed hair, too much sweat. He pants, moans, covers your mouth with his.</p><p>You inhale through your nose.</p><p>He thrusts harder, builds up that sweet clenching heat.</p><p>You smell graveyard dust.</p><p><em>Grave-dancer</em>, an unkind voice murmurs somewhere in the back of your head, its hissing whisper drowning out the rapid thud of your heart: <em>skeleton fucker, look at you. All spread open like that, a carnal eulogy for an open grave</em>.</p><p>Your eyes fly open.</p><p>Harold’s back hunches and his spine stiffens; his hips jerk forward. He whimpers. Grits his teeth. Grunts.</p><p>“I’m sorry.” His breathing’s irregular, his voice weak and shivery. “I...” He strokes lank hair back from your forehead. “I’m so sorry, I---”</p><p>A puff of cold wind touches your face.</p><p>It reeks of spent gunpowder, flop sweat, blood.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. someone saved my life tonight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rain begins just as you’re driving the bright red Range Rover out of Garvey’s hidey-hole.</p><p>“Wow.” Harold peers up through the sunroof. “Great timing, don’t you think?”</p><p><em>It’s a hell of a downpour</em>, you think, <em>but it’s nothing like the fierce bursts of south Florida---no cannon-booms of thunder shaking the car windows, no wind flinging torn-up palm leaves at the windshield, no pavement swimming underwater</em>. But visibility still hazes out, water threaded through by the magnesium glare of the high-beams and rendered too bright.</p><p>“Yeah.” You look up, too. “Excellent timing.”</p><p>The Rover bounces its way down a rutted farm road and you shift gears, ease up on the clutch; you haven’t driven a manual shift since you were sixteen. <em>Feel for the friction point</em>, you hear your grandpa say out of somewhere in the distant back of your mind, <em>then give ʼer some gas. You toe the pedal. You’re doin great babygirl---that’s all right, just let ʼer lurch it out if you gotta and try again</em>.</p><p>Thankfully, you don’t gotta.</p><p>You turn onto the road.</p><p>“Hey...you okay?”</p><p>“I haven’t driven a manual shift since high school, so.”</p><p>“How long ago was that?”</p><p>“I was sixteen when my grandfather taught me.” You think about the math. “That’s four years.”</p><p>“Oh.” Harold’s voice drops and he looks away. “I...uh, just graduated.” He shrugs. “So.”</p><p>Rain slaps the windshield, spatters in big loose circles. Rhythmic wipers slice them away.</p><p>You glance over. “How old are you?”</p><p>“Eighteen.” He watches raindrop-rivulets jitter and snake their way across the window. “Well...nineteen.” He sits back, glances over. “My birthday is next month.”</p><p>“Oh cool! I...uh, turned twenty in July.”</p><p>“Right before---”</p><p>“Yeah, that was my last real good time.” You blow out a long breath. Your fingers flex. “I had this---little party with some friends, we went to a terrific seafood restaurant on the water, I mean the food was...out of this world, really. But a couple of them didn’t show, even though it didn’t seem important at the time, because…” You shrug. “Yeah.”</p><p>“Because they were sick.”</p><p>You look at him, nod.</p><p>“Yeah, I can relate to that.” Harold laughs and it’s dry, humorless. “My sister had a wedding shower, right at the beginning, it was probably a little further along than your birthday thing because by then she was too sick to even have it. But our mom had made all the arrangements and spent all the money already, so.” He shrugs. “No one showed up…” He looks at you; his eyebrows go up, his mouth curves into a brief tight-lipped smile. “Because they were all sick too.”</p><p>“That sucks.”</p><p>“My sister sure thought so, yeah.” Harold snorts. “She spent the whole time in her bedroom, crying and whining and generating entirely too much snot over it.”</p><p>The water droplets rimming the windshield pick up the red dashboard light, glitter bright as sunlit rubies against the nighttime black.</p><p>“Sounds like maybe you and she didn’t get along?” You glance at him, keep your voice light.</p><p>“Amy? That was her name.” He sneers. “I fucking...grossed her out, she hated me, my very existence was a constant source of embarrassment. She treated me like a messy room, so...yeah, you’re right.” He looks straight ahead. “We did not get along.”</p><p>“Wow, I’m…” Your voice drops. “Sorry to hear that.”</p><p>Harold huffs. “Don’t be.”</p><p>“The house is on the right-hand side, look for a mailbox that looks like a white birdhouse.”</p><p>His tone is withering. “Are you serious?”</p><p>“Yes, Harold.” Your belly tightens and your heart beats faster and you struggle to keep it out of your voice. “I’m serious.”</p><p>“Okay.” He rubs his thighs, leans forward. His voice is subdued. “I’ll keep an eye out for it, then.” He glances over. “How far did you say it was?”</p><p>“Six miles? It might be more than that, I’m really not sure. But I know it isn’t far.”</p><p>He nods. “Okay.”</p><p>“These headlights, they make it---” You let out a long sigh. “It’s too dark, and they’re too bright, so when I look off-road…” You make an all-encompassing gesture. “All I see is just---one big buttload of pitch-ass impenetrable black.”</p><p>Harold chuckles. “That was colorful.”</p><p>The beams jitter and sweep, spotlight fleeting images: a stark skeletal clump of dead asters; a gray hand curled downward, dead fingertips swarming with ants; dead snail-trails of skinned rubber; the startled eyes of some low-to-the-ground animal, hiding in the roadside grass.</p><p>“Oh God,” you moan, rolling your eyes. “You’re not one of these <em>layyy</em>dies don’t suh-<em>wear</em> kind of guys, are you?” You giggle. “Because that will be tragic.” You flip a hand. “Trust me, it will not end well.”</p><p>“No, I am not.” He’s smiling. “Feel free to swear to your heart’s content.” He starts to laugh. “I promise that you will never hear a single solitary peep about it out of me.”</p><p>“Well goddamn, then.” You slap the wheel with both hands, raise your voice. “Fuck right!”</p><p>“Yeah.” He curls up a little, giggles. “Okay.” His shoulders shake. “Sure.” He looks at you sidelong. “Fuck right.”</p><p>“Oh come on.” You make a fist, shake it at the dashboard. “Once more but with <em>feeling</em>! Show me some <em>life</em>, Lauder.” You glance over with a restrained, tremulous smile. “I know you can do it!”</p><p>Harold’s head drops back and his giggling deepens into rich, full-throated laughter. “You’re ridiculous.”</p><p>“Well…all right.” Your face warms. You shrug a shoulder. “Maybe a little.”</p><p>He turns, leans his cheek against the headrest; he watches you, his face soft, his gaze warm and unfettered. His smile burns down, flickers at the edges. “Maybe a lot.”</p><p>“Okay, fine.” Your scalp heats up. “Fine.” You shake your head, keep your eyes on the road. “Maybe a lot.” You try not to grin. “I’ll let you win this one.”</p><p>“You’ll <em>let</em> me?” The slight edge in his voice slips into a drawl. “Really?”</p><p>“Yeah...<em>really</em>.” Your spine-skin tingles. “You know,” you go on, glancing over; your smile turns wry, self-mocking. “You should be thankful that I’m a nice person.”</p><p>He keeps his eyes on your face. “I am very thankful that you’re a nice person.”</p><p>“Oh?” You squirm in the seat. “Yeah?”</p><p>“You have no idea.” He lowers his voice. “I feel pretty lucky, actually.”</p><p>Your cheeks burn. You glance in the rearview. “Me too.”</p><p>The jammed-up tumble of cars, the trailer, the bikes still standing in the middle of the road---all of it recedes into pitch black, sinking into the land’s subconscious; beyond that battle-scar is a long empty stretch with no trees close to the road. The headlights spread out through constant dragging curtains of rain, hint at the browning backs of fields.</p><p>“Oh wow...hey.” Harold sits up, touches the dashboard screen. His voice is still soft. “This thing was pimped out all to hell...well, <em>is</em>.” His long fingers navigate through whole menus of options. He laughs, delighted. “Jeez, I’m surprised this thing doesn’t drive itself.”</p><p>“I’m pretty sure it’s new, too, like...the latest model?” You glance over. “I think Garvey just picked it off a lot somewhere...it doesn’t smell like anyone died in here.”</p><p>“Nope. It’s still got that new car scent, even.”</p><p>“Yeah.” You sniff. “I guess it does.”</p><p>Harold finds a list of preprogrammed song tracks, scrolls through them.</p><p>“What did you find?”</p><p>‘This thing’s a Wurlitzer on wheels, apparently.”</p><p>He adjusts the volume, picks one; a soft piano intro fills the dark interior of the Rover, a string of familiar chords leaking out; it pounds itself up into a repetitive, crescendoing cycle.</p><p>You blink, startled. At first there’s confusion, your mind won’t make sense of it, you look off into the dark while the notes enter your ears like a foreign language would and hang there, shimmering in visceral beauty, waiting for you to begin the laborious task of translation.</p><p>You look at him.</p><p>Harold’s relaxed in the seat, long hands folded across his belly, his head leaning back and his eyes closed; the red dashboard light outlines his profile, gleams along sharp edges of bone.</p><p><em>Oh wow</em>, you think, a sweet shiver floating down your spine. <em>Elton John</em>.</p><p>He mouths the words at first, his face asleep and his lips soft; he inhales, breathes out in his soft tenor voice: “When I think of those east end lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs…”</p><p><em>Someone Saved My Life Tonight</em>. Your chest hollows out, fills with a hot trembling breath. <em>I guess that’s...not far from the truth, is it?</em></p><p>“...sittin like a princess perched in her electric chair...and it’s one more beer, and I don’t hear you anymore...</p><p><em>My God</em>. Harold's voice moves through your skin and your eyes ache, fill with tears. <em>I haven’t heard this song in</em>---</p><p>“I thought we’d both know the lyrics,” he murmurs, his head turning; he looks at you with a soft, one-sided smile. “I mean...a lot of people know this song, right?”</p><p>“Yeah.” You wipe your eyes, look at the road. “I know it.”</p><p>He turns his face toward the windshield, sighs. “It makes me think of my dad.”</p><p>...<em>we’ve all gone crazy lately</em>---your mind follows the waiting lyric-gaps, fills them in as they appear---<em>my friend’s out there rolling round the basement floor</em>…</p><p>“My dad loved all these old songs,” Harold goes on. “I heard them at barbecues and beach parties my whole life.”</p><p>“My grandma used to tell this story, about my mom.” You sniffle and wipe your nose, let out a shaking breath. “I guess she used to dance to Elton John when she was big enough to stand up her crib, he was her favorite---they’d play her all those old ones, from the seventies.”</p><p>Harold smiles, nods. “You have to understand that my dad hated me, too,” he continues, in a fragile yet cheerful cocktail party voice, “he...I-I think everything about me must’ve revolted him, he was this big burly dude, you know...he came out of this blue collar family, worked on farms and in factories, they had the whole salt of the earth schtick going on. I guess he thought he’d end up with a big dumb meathead son but my mom’s...her genes kinda took over, I guess.”</p><p><em>And someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear</em>, you think, watching his face spasm through a fleeting but anguished wince; he looks up, drags a rawboned hand down over the tremble in his mouth. <em>Almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear?</em></p><p>“You know…” He flashes you a fleeting smile that doesn't touch his eyes. “I always found it deliciously funny, like...ironic as hell. He was this big Elton John fan but he fucking loathed queer people, I mean---”</p><p>Harold swallows and his eyes skitter away, dart back to yours.</p><p>“He was one of these guys who threatened to puke whenever he saw two guys holding hands in public, which happens quite a lot in Ogunquit, especially in the summer, and I always wanted to be like...uh.” He tries on a big blustery laugh but it doesn’t take. “Dad...you know Elton John’s a great big flamer, right?”</p><p>...<em>nearly had me roped and tied altar bound hypnotized sweet freedom whispered in my ear</em>...</p><p>“But…”</p><p>Harold’s face makes a strained, masklike expression full of black cheer; he barks out a harsh laugh, it gusts out like a sneeze, and in that single cold second he seems older, like a rude and less articulate man caught in the too-tight bonds of a young skin, and you think---<em>is that the ghost of Mr. Lauder, using his son’s throat as a doorway? Does Harold even notice? Why do we always sound like our parents at the worst possible time?</em></p><p>“But I didn’t, you know.” He rubs his nose. “Because he probably would’ve punched me.”</p><p><em>Just a pawn outplayed by a dominating queen</em>, the back of your mind marches on, plays out lyrics like a lifeline, <em>it’s four o’clock in the morning, dammit---listen to me good, I’m sleeping with myself tonight</em>---<em>God</em>, you think, hypnotized by the shattered kaleidoscope of Harold’s face and struggling to keep your eyes on the road, to keep your hands on the wheel, to not pull the Rover over and pull him out of his seatbelt and put your mouth over his and gentle him down, suck the scared and waiting tears out of his voice like a trail nurse sucking out the venom injected by a snakebite---<em>have I ever really listened to this song before?</em></p><p>“I’m sorry to hear that.” You look at yourself in the rearview and wince, hating the sound of it, middle-class prefabricated diplomacy limping its way off your tongue; it’s like offering someone a handkerchief that’s already been used by everyone else in the room. “And I hate how...pathetic that sounds, the whole...ugh, cocktail-party perfection of it, I really do.”</p><p>You reach for his hand.</p><p>“But I mean it.” Your voice wavers. “I’m so sorry, Harold.”</p><p>“He thought I was gay.”</p><p>He grabs your hand, laces your fingers together; he lays his other hand on top of it, strokes your knuckles with a soft thumb.</p><p>“Because I didn’t like football and enjoyed using my brain---I mean, you gotta love <em>that</em>, right? It’s faggy---his word, not mine---to be an intellectual person.”</p><p>“That’s---so fucked up, wow.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know. He threatened to kick me out, I was...fourteen? Maybe fifteen?” He shakes his head, squeezes your hand. “I don’t remember, but...where would I go?”</p><p>“What about your mom? Would she---”</p><p>“She was scared of him, too, so…” Harold glances at you and a bitter smile twists his mouth. “Probably?” He looks away, shrugs an apathetic shoulder. “I guess we’ll never know.”</p><p>“Thank God we’ll never know, Jesus.”</p><p>The headlights pick a blinding white shape out of the distance.</p><p>You disentangle your hand from Harold's and grab the wheel, lean closer for a better look.</p><p>There’s a pole stuck in the shoulder with a long row of silver reflectors and a boxy thing perched on top. It's got a sloped roof shape with a jaunty wooden bluebird nailed to the spine of it.</p><p>“That’s it.” You flick on the turn signal.</p><p>“Where?” Harold looks up. “Oh.” Humor creeps into his voice. “Did you really just use your blinker?”</p><p>You downshift, ease the tires onto the beginning of a long gravel drive.</p><p>“I...hey! Yes I did!” You shake your head, blow out a chuckling sigh. “It’s a habit, okay?”</p><p>The high beams sweep off the road, splash across a wide rolling lawn; the scraggly grass is grown to field height and there’s a skeletal apple tree with a tire swing hanging from one thick gnarled branch---for a disorienting second, you see the whole yard clear and bright, the grass is green, there’s a clothesline stretched between house and apple tree flapping clothes like flags; a pair of young kids fight over the swing, a dog barking somewhere.</p><p><em>I swear ʼfore Gawd</em>, calls out an exhausted mama-voice, <em>if you two don’t stop fighting I’ll get your father to cut that cursed tire down</em>.</p><p>You blink, shake your head; like a half-dream it whiffs out, a tiny candle flame smothered by a child’s breath.</p><p>“It looks derelict.”</p><p>The long narrow windows are empty, its white paint grungy and weathered down to wood in places.</p><p>“It’s nicer on the inside.” You stomp the clutch and wrestle the Rover into second gear. “It looks like the family was putting some serious money into it before...well, you know.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know.” Harold rolls his eyes, lets out a warm but tired chuckle. “You think we’ll ever stop talking about the apocalypse in euphemisms?”</p><p>The driveway’s gravel is soaked through, the dirt underneath slick and slimy as wet clay. The wheels spin, clutch at the surface.</p><p>“I don’t like that word.” You make a sour face. “It’s just too...biblical, for my taste.”</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“The literal translation of apocalypse is to uncover, or reveal, so to talk about apocalypse as a concept is to literally invoke Revelation. The only thing Captain Trips has revealed about humankind is how catastrophically fucking stupid we are.”</p><p>“Yeah, it’s…uh.” He tilts his head. “A Greek word, I think.”</p><p>“It is.” Your smile turns wry. “Surprised that I have an actual brain?”</p><p>“What? Wait...no!” He sits up. “Not exactly, but…”</p><p>“Not exactly?”</p><p>“This is going to sound really bad.” Harold holds up a hand. “But I’m from a small town, so please hear me out.”</p><p>“This is quite a preamble, Harold.”</p><p>“I know, but I know I’m about to sound like a total shit, but…” His face flushes pink. “I’ve never actually met a smart girl.”</p><p>Your eyebrows lift. “Oh?”</p><p>“I mean...you’re the first one!” He bursts out into jittery laughter, his unsteady smile twitching at the corners. He glances at your face, holds up a hand. “I mean...I haven’t before now, not in real life.”</p><p>“That sounds fucking terrible, Harold.”</p><p>“It’s true though!” He squirms in the seat. “Hey, look...I am not saying they didn’t exist in Ogunquit, Maine, population nine hundred and fifty-ish, I’m just sayin that…” He puts on a big fake smile, holds up his hands. “Well, let’s just say that none of them wasted their time talking to me.”</p><p>“That is...very hard for me to believe.”</p><p>“Well then.” His voice turns brittle. “I guess it’s a good thing you don’t have to believe in something in order for it to be true.”</p><p>“That’s true, but you don’t have to be so snotty about it.”</p><p>“I tend to get that way,” he snaps, “when people seem to think they know more about my life than I do, okay?”</p><p>“Look.” You take a deep breath. “I…I’m sorry, it’s not that I think you’re lying or something, I don’t think that at all, I guess...I just can’t really relate.”</p><p>Harold heaves an irritated sigh.</p><p>“Look…” You soften your voice. “The idea of growing up in a place that doesn’t even have a thousand people living in is utterly foreign to me.”</p><p>You glance over, find him turned away from you with his arms folded tight.</p><p>“What you’re saying, it makes sense. Especially when I remember that your high school probably only had two hundred people in it.”</p><p>He’s looking out the window.</p><p>“Harold.”</p><p>His body uncurls.</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Okay.” He takes a steadying breath and glances over his shoulder. He nods. He wipes his nose. His face is red. He smiles a little. “Where are you from?”</p><p>“When Captain Trips crashed the party, I was in Miami going to college.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“Once the air conditioning quit, the group of us decided to bail.”</p><p>“Wise choice.” Harold’s mouth pulls into a tiny smile. “That makes sense.”</p><p>“So we sailed, actually...like in a sailboat. Well, it was a yacht. We ended up sailing all the way to the Cape.”</p><p>“No shit.” He starts to grin. “Really?”</p><p>“Yeah! I know, it sounds outrageous, but that’s how it went down. We had a couple people in our group who could sail, and we figured it would be faster than driving and safer in some ways---no danger of illness coming from the rotting bodies, for instance.”</p><p>“That is...a great idea, I’m kind of envious.”</p><p>The high beams bob and lurch, bounce slices of light through a row of trees and into an open back field that might’ve once held livestock.</p><p>“Oh God---don't be, it’s quite an odyssey. I’ll tell it to you sometime...well, when we’ve got more time for storytelling, I guess.”</p><p>“That’s fair enough.”</p><p>“But to finish answering your question,” you go on, glancing at him, “I grew up in Salem, Massachusetts.”</p><p>“I wondered.” His voice is soft, subdued. He watches your face. “I thought you sounded like a New England girl.”</p><p>“Busted.” You’re grinning. “My mom’s parents lived out in farm country, though. I spent a lot of summers there.”</p><p>“So did you...uh, come back up here to look for your family?”</p><p>“I wanted to, but…” You maneuver the Rover around, roll up close to the back of the house. “By the time we got to Hyannis…” You shift into neutral, yank up the emergency brake. “I knew going all the way home would just upset me more.”</p><p>Close-up, the farmhouse is bigger than it looked from the road. It’s built in a rambling style, new sections slapped on the back of old, clad in three generations of tired white clapboard siding.</p><p>“I think so, too.”</p><p>The windows hold complete dark, a stark emptiness; <em>windows like eyes</em>, you think, a shiver wracking your shoulders. <em>I guess a house can be a corpse, too</em>.</p><p>“It’s hard when you’re the only one left, and I guess that’s just about all of us.”</p><p>The back of the house looks as though it started life as an added-on screened-in porch; it’s winterized, the screens replaced with bright white vinyl windows, the shingles too clean and bright to be anything but new. There’s a screen door, then a steel one. A set of fresh wooden stairs leads up to it.</p><p>“Hey…” Harold hesitates. “Can I ask you something?”</p><p>You turn your head.</p><p>“You don’t…” He keeps his eyes on the door. “Feel weird, about staying here?”</p><p>“Um.” The tenderness in his voice lands like a punch to the gut. “No...uh, no, not really.” You cut your eyes away, struggle to control your breathing. “It’s…the most practical choice, look at this rain, it’s coming down in buckets.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know that, but...if you---” He gets irritated and shakes his head, cuts himself off. “If there’s trauma here for you, I don’t want you…I don’t want it to...” His voice cracks. “To...uh, t-to feel like---”</p><p>“We slept on kids’ mattresses---twin size, I mean---on the floor in the kitchen,” you snap, your heart thudding in your throat. “He made us, so if we don’t sleep in the kitchen, I’ll probably be fine.”</p><p>Harold blinks. “Are you sure?”</p><p>“Well---<em>no</em>!” Your voice climbs up and up. “I guess I’m not!” It turns shrill, cracks. “I mean---yeah this is a place held hostage by shitty memories, but it’s also a warm place with a woodstove and a generator and real beds.”</p><p>“All right.” His voice is quiet.</p><p>“And...a-and I really want a shower.” Your voice loses strength. “And a hot meal, and to sleep in a real bed.”</p><p>“Okay.” He nods. “I hear you.”</p><p>You sniffle, rub your face with both hands. You take deep breaths.</p><p>Harold half-whispers your name.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>“There’s nothing to apologize for.” You shake your head, wipe your mouth with the back of one hand; your voice is strained. “You were asking a very reasonable question. It doesn't require forgiveness.”</p><p>“I know, I didn’t mean for that,” he half-whispers. “I mean that I’m sorry you’re upset.”</p><p>“I’m n---”</p><p>“Yes.” His voice is quiet, threadbare. “You are.”</p><p>Your face gets hot and your chin shakes; you lean your head back, sigh, squeeze your stinging eyes shut. Your nose fills. Tears well up from beneath your lashes.</p><p>“It’s okay,” he murmurs. “You have every right to be.”</p><p>“I…” You look up through the sunroof and your chin trembles. “I d-don’t have time for this,” you whisper. “<em>We</em> don’t have time for this.”</p><p>Rain drums the glass.</p><p>“Hey.” Harold reaches out, uses his thumb to wipe your tears. “There’s no candlelight, no lamplight in the windows.” He slides a hand over the top of your head, cups your cheek, keeps his voice low. “So while I’m fairly certain the house isn’t occupied, I think we---okay, <em>I</em>---should check anyway.”</p><p>“I’m okay.” You sniffle, rub at your eyes. “I can help you check, Harold.”</p><p>“I know you can.” His face flushes. “But…please.” He looks in your eyes and his voice wavers. “Let me do this for you?”</p><p>“Okay.” His hair’s fallen into his face. You want to reach over, slide it behind his ear. “Want me to keep the headlights on?”</p><p>“Yeah.” He nods, runs his fingers through his hair. “Keep the engine running, too.” His smile stays small. “Keep it nice and warm in here.”</p><p>You nod, wipe your wet nose.</p><p>“Speaking of heat…” Harold glances toward the house. “Where’s the generator, again?”</p><p>You point. “It’s over there.”</p><p>He unbuckles his seatbelt.</p><p>“Wait,” you whisper.</p><p>He freezes and looks at you, his eyes wide.</p><p>“What you’ll see, when you open this door,” you go on, searching his face, “is the kitchen.” You slide an arm over, take a handful of his loose jacket. “It’s big, sort of modern, looks like a renovation happened within the last five years or so.”</p><p>He glances at your hand. “Okay.”</p><p>“The twin mattresses we slept on were just left in there on the floor, so watch out for them.” You lean your head against the seat. “Don’t trip.”</p><p>Harold nods.</p><p>“When you get past the kitchen, it’s an open floor plan.”</p><p>He studies your face.</p><p>“It’s got one of those big green velour sectionals.” You close your eyes, sound exhausted. “That’s where Garvey camped out so it’s probably still a...a-a fucking garbage nest, full of empty beer cans, cigarette butts, dirty dishes---all that.”</p><p>His voice is soft. “Okay.”</p><p>“The dining area will be to your right.” Your fingers rub together, the crisp fabric smooth and crinkly. “The stairs to the second go up through the living area.”</p><p>Harold’s voice firms. “Okay.”</p><p>“I think there’s a bathroom at the top of the stairs.” You open your eyes, find his face. You sigh. “By the sound of the pipes, but I’m not sure. He never took us upstairs.”</p><p>His nostrils flare and a muscle pops in his jaw; he turns, stares at the house, and the slim ghost of an icy smile passes over his mouth.</p><p>“Hey.” You smile. “I really don’t think there’s anyone in there.”</p><p>A brief smile tilts his mouth. “But we can’t be too careful.”</p><p>"Absolutely.”</p><p>“Hey...you should get your gun out, too.” Harold nods at the center console. “Just in case.”</p><p>"Okay."</p><p>Harold opens the door. The rain noise gets louder.</p><p>You tug his jacket. “Wait.”</p><p>His tensed-up face shivers back and forth between grim resolve and an unrestrained tenderness. “What is it?”</p><p>“Kiss me,” you whisper. “Before you go in there...” You ease yourself up and out of your slump, lean over. “I want you to kiss me.”</p><p>“Oh.” He blushes.</p><p>“Come here.” You let go of his jacket to tuck hair behind one of his ears and his lips part, his breath stuttering. “Just in case anything goes wrong,” you whisper.</p><p>Harold blinks and nods, slides a hand around the back of your neck. The tips of his fingers are cool, his palm hot. “Okay,” he murmurs.</p><p>Your eyes slide shut and his erratic breath touches you first, like feathers, soft and hot as ash, and you almost speak---your breath backs up, waits to see if your lips will twitch in time to ask him if he heard something, if he hears something, even now, even though there's nothing but rain and the long heavy silence of an emptied world---that shouldn’t be part of a late autumn night, and in the humming seconds before his mouth inhales the short distance, you imagine a conversation:</p><p>
  <em>Hey, Harold.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>What is it?</em>
</p><p><em>Can you hear---</em>did<em> you hear---something odd?</em></p><p>
  <em>Something? What does that mean? When?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It means ever. At all.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Like...what?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I don’t know---a voice?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Nope.</em>
</p><p><em>Not even while we were</em>---</p><p>His relaxed mouth bumps up against yours, his lips parted; it feels like there's hesitation in his face but he’s so soft, so slow, so lazy about forming the seal that all thought jitters apart. Your trembling fingers make a harbor from one hard curve of cheekbone and your skin wakes up, jolted out of its disjointed dream---your breath blasts out of you, his soft tongue brushes yours and your pussy clenches up hard as a fist; you moan, your mouth flooded and your hair full of fever, your heart pounding, the darkness inside your head spinning. He pulls back and you lean forward and his rapid breath buries itself in your hot cheek; he cups the back of your head, grips it tight, presses his mouth against your skin. Each burst of breath leaves through his nostrils, makes a thin soft agonized whimper. Gooseflesh drifts down the backs of your arms.</p><p>“Jesus,” you gasp.</p><p>He nods, his grip tightening, his lungs working, his mouth still buried in the hollow of your cheek.</p><p>“Fuck, Harold,” you whisper, your body trembling.</p><p>He pulls his mouth away just enough to speak. “If I kiss you again,” he murmurs, his thumb stroking your pulse, “I won’t stop.”</p><p>You hold your breath so the moan stays locked in your chest but the air shudders out of you in a ragged gust and your throat arches. You nod. “Okay.”</p><p>“I’m gonna go,” he murmurs, pulling your throat closer; he tilts his head, kisses your pulse, slides the bridge of his nose across your temple. He whispers into your hairline: “Is that all right?”</p><p>“Y-Yes.” You bite your lip. “Go,” you whisper.</p><p>You don’t move. You sit as still as you can and keep your eyes closed, listen to him re-ravel his breath; it’s slow work, full of skipped beats and patience. Your mind fills in the gaps with the things it knows: a reddened nose, his lips still trembling, his breath still coming fast enough to chill the inside of his mouth.</p><p>“Wait.” He rests his thumb across the center of your mouth. “I’ll come back for you.”</p><p>You nod, open your eyes; you look into his face and your mind is still soft, your thoughts disjointed and losing heat---<em>someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear</em>.</p><p>You watch him turn away from you and push the door open and climb out of the cab; the rain rushes down out of a roiling sky and it doesn’t take long for it to drench his jacket, his jeans, his hair.</p><p>
  <em>Didn’t you, dear?</em>
</p><p>His breath makes big white billowing clouds.</p><p>His teeth chatter.</p><p>You reach over, crank the heat all the way up.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. a harvest-work of touch and worry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Through the night I swing the sickle of my wonders,</em>
  <br/>
  <em>        a harvest-work—of touch and worry.</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Spend dawn and its day burning my dead—</em>
  <br/>
  <em>        Who fell in the night? What the night reaped?</em>
</p><p>                                                           Natalie Diaz, “<a href="https://granta.com/i-minotaur/">I, Minotaur</a>”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Harold begins your occupation of the house by tossing out the twin mattresses, one at a time.</p><p>You watch them cross the high beams, still fluttering their sheets, and cartwheel off through pouring rain to flop somewhere in the dark. When he’s done, he dashes out into the high beams and gives you the thumbs up.</p><p>You fall back in your seat and laugh, nod, give thumbs up back, ignore the blur in your eyes, the fresh tears.</p><p>He hurries back inside to dissect the house’s black guts with his flashlight beam.</p><p>You slump back and sigh, arrange your legs underneath the wheel. You lean your head back to watch the rain land on the sunroof.</p><p>The engine rumbles under you, the vents pump out heat.</p><p>Time gets loose, sloppy---the clean warmth of the brand-new heating system brushes your nose and cheeks, your spine hurts, your joints are stiff, every muscle in your body is heavy and sullen. The heat builds up inside the cab until it fogs the windows, until it drowses through your skin, until it slows your blood.</p><p>
  <em>Have I ever been this tired?</em>
</p><p>You watch the rain strike the smoked glass until it’s a struggle to form a thought, to keep yourself anchored in the present.</p><p>Your eyes drift shut.</p><p>A memory from childhood pops alight, fills the dark behind your closed lids with flickers of imagery and heat: riding back home in the winter, it’s your parents’ wedding anniversary and the heat in the car is cranked up so your mother wouldn’t get cold in her strappy shoes and sparkly black dress; you’re coming home from grandma’s where she let you play in the snow all day---cross-country skiing, snowman-building, snowball-fighting with the kids who lived next door---and your little body is wrapped up tight in an old beach blanket and full of heavied bones, hot food, a simple contented exhaustion.</p><p>Thoughts unravel into image and sensation and emotion.</p><p>You find yourself in a new dark, a place you’ve never seen before but it’s a New England beach town; you’d know it by its weathered shingles and white paint and studied quaint air, as intentional as makeup on an old lady’s face, and while this one’s tiny and empty there’s a spark---a pulse of heat and light dwarfed by the sudden explosion of relentless emptiness, this drain on sound, the horror of an entire collective breath turned loose and never inhaled again.</p><p>You can see this place, but at first you’re not of it; you pass from empty space to empty space like a wind.</p><p>There’s a girl.</p><p>Well, she’s a woman but young. Curled up on a sidewalk, her butt perched on a curb. She’s dressed like a young person: cutoff jeans shorts, a loose and worn-out band t-shirt so faded that it doesn’t matter, bare and dirtied feet. There’s something in her furled tightness, the off-alignment of her spine, how her cheek angles on her knees that whispers of a hot and sticky shame.</p><p>You want to pull away and at first you cross the winds like a ghost would but then there’s resistance and weight and revulsion---<em>she revolts me but I don’t know why</em>, you think; the silence gets louder and your skin picks up changes in the air and when you look around, you can feel your clothes brushing your skin. Your hair tickles the sides of your face. <em>But I will know why, I just have to wait for it because some part in me already </em>does <em>know why</em>.</p><p>You stand in the middle of a street and it all falls into place with a terrible weight; it displaces your guts, flattens your bloodstream, carries with it the stink of the sea mingling with the stink of death and the wind here is cold as lightless depths even though it’s high summer and the wild roses keep on rioting their honey-pungent berry sweetness over the terrible death miasma.</p><p>“You look different in life,” you say, unaware that words have formed in your head until they fall out of your mouth. “When you’re here.” You take in an uncertain breath and it tastes fresh and salty and full of decay. “When you’re not afraid for it.”</p><p>The girl-woman jerks her head in your direction, bouncing her long amber waves off her neck; her pretty pillow-lipped smile is delicate and tired and you can see the appeal, living Frannie marooned in a dreamscape far away from the ground of her quick and brutal death carries a secret beauty inside her brand of everyday prettiness---a kind of glint, light flickering off a restless thing that could be open warmth or unstable emotion or the kind of intelligence that pretty girls often have: the kind that isn’t hidden, yet manages to go unnoticed by men.</p><p>Frannie smiles.</p><p>You lift a hand, flash your palm in a silent wave.</p><p>Her face is pink and tear-stained and drawn too tight against its underlying bone; she knows your name, waves back, speaks with a low pleasant voice.</p><p>For a faint flickering second, you have the idea that you ought to curtsy; the mental image of a little girl in a white Easter dress dashes out of your subconscious, skips through the forefront of your mind, dives back into your recesses: <em>good evening, miss. I am pleased to meet you</em>.</p><p>You nod. “Hello, Frances Goldsmith.”</p><p>“You’re different, too.” Her smile opens up, turns dazzling. “A girl who has left her chains behind...that girl dances when she walks, even if she doesn’t know it.”</p><p>You’re embarrassed. “Thanks?”</p><p>“Freedom really suits you.” She holds up a hand, tilts the palm to the sky. She looks up and moves her head around, cranes her neck as if counting the stars. “Welcome to Ogunquit, even though you were never here.”</p><p><em>And likely never will be</em>, you think, taking slow steps toward her; you cross the street and step up onto a sidewalk like she’s some kind of wounded and dangerous creature and the edges of the world shimmer all around your footfalls.</p><p>“Oh, I don’t know about that.”</p><p>Frannie unfolds her knees. She stretches her feet and in that gesture you see how small she is, how birdlike and light.</p><p><em>Delicate</em>, you think. <em>And hollow-boned, for it’s not enough that femininity claim as little space as possible; it must also be fragile, kept intact at some man’s will, held together by a prayer</em>.</p><p>“Harold will want to come back here, someday.”</p><p>In a practiced gesture, she flips a sheaf of hair back over one shoulder. She glances at you and the broadness of her smile glitters within the bluing dark.</p><p>“He puts on a lot of guff about how much he hates it here, but the truth is that this land is as much a part of him as he is a part of it.”</p><p><em>He hates this place</em>. You don’t move. You keep your eyes on her; it’s so quiet you can hear the roar of the ocean, a constant booming growl. <em>The way an animal hates a trap</em>.</p><p>“From its soil he sprang and it’s likely that to it he will want to return, I mean…” She straightens up and tosses all of her hair back and snort-laughs. “You can take the boy out of Maine, but you can’t---”</p><p>“Take Maine out of the boy,” you whisper, an icy shiver clicking its way down your spine.</p><p>The click-clack of an old-fashioned typewriter echoes over your heads and the empty vault of the world takes that lonely sound and amplifies it into something portentous.</p><p>“This isn’t before-Harold,” Frannie says, brushing at her thighs like they’re caked in sand. She moves onto her feet, points to a candlelit upstairs window. “This is cusp-Harold.”</p><p>You look at the candlelight as it comes down from the window and flutters around her head and shoulders, watch it break her face down into trembling shapes: curved lines, flat planes, deep creases, black hollows.</p><p>“But right now…” Frannie turns toward you and her eye sockets fill with shadow, her mouth-shape curving into a blade; the eyes themselves glitter like water at the bottom of a well. “The two Harolds aren’t much different.”</p><p>“Right now?” You turn toward the house. “When is right now?”</p><p>Frannie drifts closer. She comes up behind you and rests a light hand on your shoulder and a wind comes, blows through her hair; she smells like a day spent at the ocean, sunlit hay, damp mud, dry stone.</p><p>“This is the night I almost went to him first.”</p><p>Your head jerks around and your body turns with it. You skip backward, trip over your own feet and her hand slides off you; you put her back in your sights and your body gets lighter, your skin buoyant, your head rushing up toward some surface. You regain your balance and the wind gusts somewhere, howls like a woman.</p><p>Your chest tightens. Your throat heats up, like you’ve swallowed a candle flame. Your face reddens. “He doesn’t know, does he?”</p><p>Frannie shakes her head, face appearing and disappearing inside the thin candlelight. “No.”</p><p>You lock your eyes on her face and your body freezes, the way an animal’s would. “What would you have done?”</p><p>“Nothing good.” She shrugs and lilts her voice, sounds like a girl again---gossiping perhaps, clustered beside a high school locker and looking for camaraderie while sorting through someone else’s bad choices. “His…um.” She pulls in a delicate breath, blows it out. “Fervor, shall we call it? I mean, it’s got a lot of gravity---”</p><p><em>And gravity is</em>---</p><p>“One hell of an irresistible force yeah but so is loneliness, so is this whole disjointed feeling we’re stuck with, this being out of sync with the world---hell, so is the total disappearance of this world, the world we call the world!” She spreads her arms and tosses her head back, stares up into the sky, laughs a jagged laugh. “Right?”</p><p><em>But</em>---</p><p>She reins herself in, claps a hand over her mouth. She looks at you, lets her hand fall away and her face assumes its demure default: wide eyes, soft cheeks, smooth forehead, a slight parting of the lips. Her shoulders slump. Her voice lowers but so do her eyelids and a tiny smile alights in her face, curls the corners of her mouth. Her eyes dance. “He wanted me.”</p><p><em>There’s the shame, cloaked in this play at mockery</em>, you think, <em>slinking in on its little cat feet</em>.</p><p>“He would’ve done anything for me, it…” Frannie sighs, glances up at the window. Her voice turns wistful. “Would’ve been so easy.”</p><p>You study the look on her face---part nostalgic, part smug, part shame-laden, part some dark secretive thing beyond your ability to parse---and a throb of some other dark thing hisses in the back of her throat: it’s hot as a spark, piquant and gunpowder-fresh. You feel a flash of crawling gooseflesh that’s more simmer than unease and a sense of attention hanging off it like a weight of leeches; above all that there’s a weight that feels like midsummer sunlight, thick and gold and glorious as a lover’s breath.</p><p>There’s other stuff too, a tumbling jumble of it, but you shove it all back into darkness but with it comes the flashbulb-glare of illumination:</p><p><em>She wanted to know deification, feel body-worship; any kiss from Harold would’ve landed past skin and gone soul-deep, wormed supplication and mortification and his reckless moaning sacrifice straight into her blood and---and who the fuck doesn’t want that? Who wouldn’t take it? Everyone deep-down dreams of knowing what it is to be worshipped. Hands and lips eager, breath warmed by prayers of blood to sanctify you, wash you with spit into a holy relic and here’s poor lil Frannie with her fragile relationships built on what’s cool, poor lil Frannie left marooned here with no emotional compass of her own and all alone in the empty world beneath the world</em>.</p><p>You can see it:</p><p>It’s a bedroom you’ve never seen but it could be a young man’s room, there’s a certain kind of absentminded neglect happening on all the surfaces and the walls are covered in papers, it’s that kind of dark and disheveled---here’s Harold on his knees on a dark wood floor and bent over, his febrile wound of a mouth pressed tight and trembling to her feet, each vertebra sharp under the skin, his long spine a serrated edge to slice open your breath and bleed out your most fragile moans.</p><p>Frannie’s not even naked. Her breasts are out and her hair is down and there are candles everywhere, it’s a scene out of an overwrought romantic thriller---white girl with soft waves, translucent pink nipples, torn-up breath, hesitant attention, a benevolent mouth.</p><p>This frame of lensed light won’t show you his face; its slippery orange shows only the sweat on his skin, the hollowed-out bones that lie beneath.</p><p>But it gilds the expression on hers---cultivated disinterest on the verge of shattering---with all of a flickering fire’s kindest tones.</p><p>“You would’ve taken advantage.” Your breath shakes. <em>Like a vulture sitting in a tree, perched high up and eye-rolling its way through a small animal’s death throes</em>.</p><p>“But I didn’t do it, though.”</p><p>Frannie runs her gaze across your unstable face; she puts her hands on her hips and sounds like someone backtracking, a fed-up teenager, a liquid-tongued lothario attempting to seduce you away from your last few dollars.</p><p>“It would’ve been wrong, but right now we’re not talking about what’s wrong or what’s right...what we’re talking about is what actually happened.”</p><p><em>You mean we’re talking about what </em>might’ve<em> happened</em>.</p><p>“Yes.” She nods and turns her face up toward the window. She sighs and there’s a tender shiver in her face, an unfolding; a gust of sullen mean-girl longing blows through her voice. “That too.”</p><p>She’s still pretty. The thin candlelight is kind to her the way it’s kind to everyone and her summer fresh prettiness, bland but sweet, just ripe enough, dusted over with sun-placed freckles---a bygone era might’ve used words like dewy and doe-eyed---is still there and it’s an injustice, to be honest, given the way her narrow-minded selfishness sits on her girl-next-door features with its lies wide open and its jaws drooling. It’s a dull-eyed look, plain as the nose on her face; it’s indifferent to any appetites save its own, yet the tilt of her head is still fetching and her too-wide eyes could be innocent. Her eyelashes still flutter like a little girl’s. Her pink mouth is still dewy as a rose.</p><p><em>Pretty girls are always pretty</em>, you think, <em>and even when their cruelty is naked and spelled out it always comes with perfect diction, the baked-in promise of a flutter in the belly, wannabe bedroom eyes, the sweetest smile</em>.</p><p>The harsh pecking of the typewriter brings to mind a flurry of black-winged birds, a naked tree, a carrion-feast.</p><p>“You’re a terrible person.” It’s hard not to cry. “A legitimate bitch.”</p><p>“But I didn’t do it!” Frannie rounds on you with her fist tight at her sides, her voice loud and bursting out of her. “I might’ve been, if I had.” The words come out both shrill and bored. “But I didn’t!”</p><p>Her nose wrinkles before her whole face grimaces into a prickly flash of disgust; her expressions are mercurial, a shimmer here and a flicker there before she buries the whole thing with a soft curved smile, a twinkle of dimple, a well-timed giggle.</p><p><em>Besides he’s...just Harold</em>. You hear it in your head. It’s quiet and bled of all emotion, conspiratorial as a whisper, hot on the inside of your ear, but it’s her voice. <em>He’s like...Amy’s afterbirth</em>.</p><p>Your forehead spasms. Your mouth springs open. Your breath flips. Your heart knocks on your ribs. Your stomach twists up around itself, squeezes your throat, heaves.</p><p>“Of course.” You glare at her. “Of course it is, because...it nourishes until it’s no longer needed.” The tears well up, smear the outline of her into the surrounding dark. “And then you cut it off.” Your body wracks through a suppressed sob. Your nose burns. Your tears choke you. “And then you throw it away.”</p><p>Frannie drops a heavy sigh. She offers a small smile and shakes her head, tosses that headful of salon-girl hair around. She tilts her head.</p><p>You scrub the wet off your face.</p><p>“But I guess it doesn’t matter though, does it?” Frannie shoves her hands into her back pockets and rocks up on the balls of her feet. She watches the window. “Because now I’m dead, and he’s all yours.”</p><p>The tears keep spilling and they run off our face, drip onto the dry pavement; your throat won’t stop spasming, won’t stop wringing your breath.</p><p>Frannie starts to hum.</p><p>Your breath stammers and you wrestle it down, hold it in; your chest heaves. You purse your lips, blow it out. “Harold?”</p><p>The click-clacking stops.</p><p>“Harold?” You step up onto the sidewalk. “It’s...wait.” You rub the snot off your nose. “Do you even know me here?” Your wavering voice warms the silence. “I mean...can you?”</p><p>Frannie starts to sing, her voice quiet and soft: “When I think of those east end lights... ”</p><p>“Harold?”</p><p>“Muggy nights, the curtains drawn in the little room downstairs…” Frannie’s voice turns reedy and soft. “Prima donna Lord you really should have been there.” Her body sways from side to side. “Sittin' like a princess, perched in her electric chair...”</p><p>Harold sticks his head out the window.</p><p>Frannie clasps her hands behind her back; she turns her face up, makes her voice soulful. “And it's one more beer, and I don't hear you anymore…we've all gone crazy lately…”</p><p>“Hi, it’s…” You trail off.</p><p>“My friend's out there,” Frannie lowers her voice to a half-whisper, “rolling 'round the basement floor…”</p><p>Harold blinks. His eyebrows furrow; he grips the window frame and murmurs your name into a question.</p><p>“And someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear…”</p><p>The front door bangs open.</p><p>Frannie chuckles, takes a step backward; she speaks the next couple of lines like a slam poet, makes a beat out of clapping her hands. “You almost had your hooks in me, didn't you dear?”</p><p>Harold lunges out into the yard, breathless and angry. “What are you doing here?”</p><p>“I don’t…” You take a step toward him but your thighs get heavy. “Know, Frannie…”</p><p>He’s wearing a dark plaid bathrobe and pajamas, his eyes raw and lost; his hair is damp and combed back, his mouth hovering open, his narrow cheeks still flushed from where he scraped them smooth with a razor. He hurries close to you and your legs slew one against the other, knees knocking, spilling your body onto the pavement; you grab his bathrobe on the way down.</p><p>“Frannie’s in the street, like she’s…” You half-turn onto your back, your voice rustling into a thin, dry whisper. “Watching you.”</p><p>“I can’t move you.” He moves the hair off your face. “Look at this...you’re dead weight.”</p><p>“But she’s…” Your eyes slide shut and you feel for his wrist. “She’s still here,” you whisper. “She wanted to…”</p><p>He murmurs your name, curls a warm smooth palm over your forehead. “There’s no one here but you.”</p><p>A chill breeze hits your face and you can smell her: tidal flats, fresh-cut hay, rotting roses, graveyard dust.</p><p>“But…” You crease your face, struggle to open your eyes. “I smell her, Harold...I…”</p><p><em>Hear it loud as day; she’s walking away from us right now and it’s a sound like high heels striking stone and trailing off down the road just turn your head toward the sea and search the dark and you’ll see...you’ll s</em>---</p><p>“You’ve got to wake up.”</p><p>Your eyes fly open and there’s only darkness. <em>What</em>?</p><p>“You’ve got to wake up because---”</p><p><em>I can’t carry you</em>.</p><p>You search the dark, try to navigate your way through it; there’s a soft weight, a dimensional smoky atmosphere and through it you feel for your own skin, struggle toward some kind of sensation---<em>wind cold humidity dead roses underfoot sand grit thin spidery branches brushing the touch of Harold’s skin</em>; you try summoning it, chant thoughts like words, as if you could think hard enough to sing the dead landscape of Ogunquit back to life, but all that soft weight turns smothering and you lose all awareness of your own limbs.</p><p><em>You’ve got to</em>---</p><p>Out of your insides comes a weak and rattling splatter, a relentless overlapping tap tap tap tap.</p><p><em>But I can’t move</em>, you want to say, but you have no mouth.</p><p>“Wake up!”</p><p>It’s Harold’s voice but it’s coming from a distance and it’s soft, high-pitched, splintering in his throat; underneath the noise of him is a tightening hum, a thrumming sense of unformed terror.</p><p>There’s rain and rumbling underneath you, too much heat, a smell of water and clean soap, something savory---a flurry of images stacks up, transparent and fluttering: kitchen table, slanted light, a red and white checked tablecloth, your small body wrapped tight a pink terry cloth bathrobe with a swollen throat and a dull pulsing headache and a steaming blue bowl on the table in front of you it’s spring and sunny and there’s soft green grass after the long white deep freeze of winter and you’re indoors missing your April vacation because</p><p>---<em>strep throat</em>, you think, I was seven, <em>I had strep throat, Mom was worried about scarlet fever because I had it when I was four, I gave it to all the other kids at the daycare and she always worried</em>---</p><p>Your body jolts itself all the way out of sleep.</p><p>“Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me!”</p><p>You gasp.</p><p>
  <em>Is that chicken soup?</em>
</p><p>“I brought this out here because I thought maybe you had a blood sugar crash or something and then I couldn’t get you to wake up so of course I’m fucking paranoid and all ready for the worst so I started to think that maybe this vehicle has a carbon monoxide problem…”</p><p>Your eyes fly open.</p><p>“There you are.” Harold’s voice cracks, fills with tears. “You scared the fucking shit out of me.”</p><p>“I’m sorry.” Your voice sounds like a desert wind, a throatful of crows. “I was…” Your tonsils stick together and you jerk forward, launch into a volley of harsh dry coughs; your head pulses into sharp pain. You wince, squeeze your eyes shut. “Having a bad dream.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>You turn your head toward him. The stiffened muscles in your neck and shoulders pull tight, spasm into a raw and sullen pain; you grunt a little, open your eyes.</p><p>He’s turned sideways in the passenger seat, leaning over you; he’s studying your face, his hair damp and combed back, his face flushed. The skin over his cheeks and jaw is smooth, shiny, clean-shaven. There’s a fuzzy glittery purple scarf wound around his neck and the rest of his body’s swallowed up by a puffy black parka that’s way too big for him.</p><p>You sniff, get a faint odor of sporty soap.</p><p>There’s a stillness in his face, a restrained caution; he’s searching your face, the expression on his own occulted and trembling.</p><p>“I’m sorry.” You put a hand on his arm. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”</p><p>“I know, I figured...didn’t want to...I mean.” He closes his eyes, lets out a sigh. “I-I thought that…” He trails off, looks away. He glances at the house. “You’ve been sleeping out here a long time.”</p><p>The air between you fills with the quickening hollow rattle of the rain.</p><p>“What do you mean, a long time?”</p><p>“I mean...hours?” Harold’s voice is small. He shrugs. “I covered you with the blanket and turned off the car but after awhile I worried that you were too cold so I came back out here and I…” He shakes his head, quirks his mouth into a flat smile. “Turned the car on again.”</p><p>“Wait.” You grab the wheel, haul yourself up. “You let me sleep out here for hours?”</p><p>“You were tired, I…” He flinches and his voice softens. “Thought you needed the sleep?”</p><p>“Did you leave the headlights on, too?”</p><p>“No!” He blinks, his mouth falling open. His eyes dart over your body as he backs up; he looks in your eyes and his voice sharpens. “Of course not!</p><p>You sit back, rub your face with your hands. “What have you been doing?”</p><p>“Well, I…” He looks at the house. “I cleaned out the kitchen and the living room, and I got the wood stove going, I made us some food, and…” He blushes. “I boiled some water and took a bath.”</p><p>“You did all that by yourself?”</p><p>He nods.</p><p>“But…” You sputter, your voice rising. “Why?”</p><p>“Wha…” Harold’s mouth works. “I-I thought it might be…” His eyes narrow and he recoils, his voice warping with sweetened mockery. “I don’t know, nice?”</p><p>“But...I could’ve...I <em>should’ve</em>…” Your voice gets tighter, louder. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”</p><p>“I just said that I didn’t wake you up because I thought you could use the sleep, I was trying to do you a favor, but the first thing you do when you wake up is treat me like I’m...incompetent, like I can’t handle things, and I don’t think I deserve that!”</p><p>“You should’ve woken me up, Harold.”</p><p>“It’s going to shock you, I know,” he sneers, “but I am perfectly capable of managing things myself.”</p><p>“It’s not <em>about</em> that!” A shrill edge wavers in your voice. “When did I say you couldn’t manage things?”</p><p>“Oh come on,” he snarls, rolling his eyes. “Subtext is a thing.”</p><p>“I’m not…” You look at him, your forehead tight and trembling; the rest of your breath sags out of your lungs. “I’m not subtexting at you, Harold. Jesus.” Your voice softens, goes quiet. “I just wanted to help you.”</p><p>His widened eyes blink and his face twitches. He blasts breath out through his nostrils , his mouth trembling at the corners. He blinks again, a raw fragility entering his eyes.</p><p>“I’m mad at you because now I feel like I haven’t done my part. You did all that work...I did nothing.”</p><p>“But I wan---”</p><p>“Shhh, that doesn’t matter, I’m angry at myself, I mean...you must be exhausted.”</p><p>He nods. “Yeah,” he whispers.</p><p>“I feel like you’re exhausted because of me, can’t you understand that?”</p><p>His face turns red and he nods, cuts his eyes away. “Oh.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Your voice cracks. “Oh.”</p><p>“I didn’t think of it like that, I’m...” His voice is husky. He looks down, rubs his nose. “Sorry.”</p><p>“It’s---”</p><p>A stuttering flash of lightning crackles across the thick gray sky, flashes the cab full of blinding white light.</p><p>“Fuck.” Harold peers up through the sunroof. “We should g---”</p><p>A boom of thunder breaks open overhead; it fills your ears, slams down all around you and concusses the ground.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. girl as a stained glass window</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>I have torn everyone who reached out for me</em>
  <br/>
  <em>But I swear by this song</em>
  <br/>
  <em>And by all that I have done wrong</em>
  <br/>
  <em>I will make it all up to thee</em>
</p><p>                                 Leonard Cohen, “Bird on the Wire”</p><p> </p><p>The smell of food digs into your stomach. It’s the first thing you notice upon stumbling into the house; rich and sweet and salted and thick, your belly roils itself up into snarling knots. Your mouth pulses full of spit and you rub thin lines of drool off your chin and you’d be embarrassed if it wasn’t half-dark in the kitchen, if Harold wasn’t behind you, if the only light wasn’t a scattering of votive candles in little glass dishes and the soft blue flame of the stovetop.</p><p>The continuous spattering hum of torrential rain vibrates the heavy silence of the house. The candle flames whisper, flickering soft as moth wings.</p><p>You hurry to the pot, stick your face in the steam. You inhale it and Harold’s behind you, murmuring; he puts a hand on the center of your back and apologizes, says it isn’t much, that it’s only a can of spaghetti-Os with meatballs mixed into some boiled pasta shells.</p><p>He takes down a canister of parmesan cheese. It’s the powder, the salty gritty kind that sits on a shelf in a cabinet somewhere until someone comes along and opens it, but it’s better than nothing---you shake all over and look into the pot of noodles and you imagine just sticking your hands in there, scooping out saucy pasta shells with your fingers and stuffing handfuls into your wet and aching mouth but he’s already moving around you, a bowl cradled by one big hand, a plastic serving spoon gripped in the other.</p><p>“I’ve got it.” Harold shovels food out of the pot. “Go sit.”</p><p>The lighting strobes over the countryside, fills the living room with blinding flashes.</p><p>You plop down on a stool at the kitchen island. He sticks a fork in the earthenware bowl and passes it over and you grab it, hug it to your breasts, stuff your mouth full. The noodles are salty at first, then sweet, the taste of caked-on parmesan sharp and funky; you gulp down your first few mouthfuls half-chewed.</p><p>Harold takes a seat across from you. He folds his long hands on the countertop and smiles, his face calm. He watches you eat.</p><p>You shiver. Your clothes are soaked, cold rain poured out of the sky and even though the two of you sprinted your way into the house like a couple of spooked kids it was a heavy enough downpour to saturate the thin dirty t-shirt you’ve been wearing for days, your torn-up and battered jeans, the bright pink Converse low tops you picked out of a shattered storefront in Hyannis during the last week of July.</p><p>You scoop food into your mouth, your teeth chattering around the soft noodles.</p><p>A boom of thunder rattles the stacked plates hidden behind closed cabinet doors.</p><p>“Do you want tea?”</p><p>You look up at him, nod.</p><p>“There’s honey...do you like honey?”</p><p>Lightning disrupts the dim candlelight, blocks the mild amber tones out before letting them slide back in.</p><p>“Yes.” You swallow, lick sauce off your lips. “I love honey.”</p><p>He gets up, circles around the island. He’s wearing dark gray sweatpants with the waistband strings cinched tight on his narrow hips and a black waffle-weave long underwear top, the long sleeves pushed up his sinewy forearms. He lights a burner. The flames hiss to life. He turns the gas all the way up and thin blue light coats his long fingers, dances up to his elbows; it cools his forehead and darkens his lips, outlines the shape of his nose.</p><p>“I thought you might want something hot.” He settles a copper-bottomed pot over the ring and steps sideways, reaches up to open a pair of cabinets; there’s an unstudied grace to his movements, a catlike slip to his shoulders and an elegance in the shift of his long spine that comes out when he thinks no one is looking. Your eyes follow the knobby slope of his nape. “There’s, uh...Earl Grey, some oolong with hibiscus, and...green with spearmint.”</p><p>“I’ll take the Earl Grey.”</p><p>“It’s the kind with lavender.” Harold half-turns, watches you over one angular shoulder. “Is that okay?”</p><p>“Yeah.” You nod, give him a brief smile. “That’s terrific, actually.”</p><p>Thunder booms, distant and rumbling.</p><p>“Good.” His smile is slight, close-lipped; his eyes soften, crinkle at the corners. He takes down a mug. “Terrific is good.”</p><p>A faint restless heat finds it way into your cheeks and you look down into the bowl. You stir the fork around. Most of the pasta is gone.</p><p>“Thank you, Harold.”</p><p>“For what?”</p><p>A flicker of lightning flashes white and brittle through the kitchen’s warm dimness.</p><p>“For the food.”</p><p>“Well, I needed to feed myself anyway and I certainly wasn’t going to leave you out.”</p><p>“Good.” You start to giggle. “I appreciate that.”</p><p>“I think the hot water might be hot,” he says, his smile brightening. “If you’re ready to get cleaned up, that is.” He angles his torso in the direction of the sink. “The water in the hot water heater, I mean, let’s just...test that out.” He reaches out and twists the tap. Water spits and burbles out of the spigot. He sighs. “That’s not the most encouraging sign.”</p><p>“If the hot water isn’t ready…” You scarf down the last few bites, scrape up the last of the sauce. “How did you take a bath?” You lick the fork. “Did you boil water?”</p><p>He nods, runs his fingers back and forth beneath the stream. He glances at you. “Yeah.”</p><p>You toss the fork into the bowl. “Is it getting warmer?”</p><p>“Yeah, I think…” He touches the water with just the tips of his fingers. He grins. “Yup.”</p><p>You giggle. “I could kiss you for this.”</p><p>“Well…” He turns his head and makes an exaggerated come-hither face, looks over his shoulder; his eyebrows lift and his smile turns slow and sweet. “You are certainly welcome to.”</p><p>Your grin widens and you snort laughter. Blood rushes to your head and a brief shimmering spasm of dizziness spins the room; your heart skips a beat, speeds up. Heat floods your skin. You blink, the minute details of things drifting to a slow stop. You blink again. Your whole head throbs.</p><p>“I think I’m dehydrated.” You push the empty bowl aside, rub your temples. Your eye sockets pulse. “Is there anything to drink?”</p><p>“I made instant lemonade for myself.” He grabs the canister out of the cabinet and twists around, holds it up. “It’s pink.” His eyebrows lift. “You want some?”</p><p>“Yes, please.”</p><p>“Could be the food hitting your system.” He gestures at your face. “You get a little dizzy just now?”</p><p>“Yeah.” You nod. “How’d you know?”</p><p>“You got quite a flush.” He fills a large plastic cup with cold water. “Your face is all red.” he puts the cup on the counter. “That happened to me, too, when I ate. I shoveled down all those carbs and five minutes later the room was spinning.” He chuckles, his shoulders shaking with it. “My poor bloodstream, I don’t think she was quite ready for a glucose rush of that magnitude.”</p><p>You straighten your back, cross your ankles. “When was the last time you ate?”</p><p>“The last time I ate a full meal was this morning, right after sunrise.” Harold’s fingers span the canister and he loosens the lid, peels it off. He fishes the little plastic scoop out of the powder. “I had a piece of jerky and some iced tea like...an hour or two before...well, you know.” He scoops some, dumps it in the glass. He stirs the powder in with a butter knife. He shrugs. “Before everything happened.”</p><p>“I ate meal bars for lunch, it was in the afternoon but barely...he used the bars for convenience.” You take in a breath. “That and a little baggie with dried fruit and peanuts in it...what is that stuff called?” You snap your fingers. “Trail mix!” You point at him. “That’s what it was, trail mix. With a bottle of water.”</p><p>“Are you still hungry?”</p><p>“No, I don’t think so.” You shake your head. “If I eat much more I’ll make myself sick.”</p><p>The teakettle begins to whistle.</p><p>“Lucky you.” Harold lifts the kettle off the stove and pours steaming water into the mug. “You get to have a hot drink and a cold drink.”</p><p>“Thankfully they’re the kind that taste good together.”</p><p>He brings you the mug and the cup, glances at your face; he slides them in front of you, a small soft tremulous smile on his lips.</p><p>“Thanks,” you half-whisper.</p><p>Harold takes the seat beside you. “Is this okay?” His mouth relaxes and his eyes roam your face. “Or do you want me to move?”</p><p>“No, no…” You glance at him sidelong, curl your fingers around the mug. “You can stay.”</p><p>He nods and leans forward, slides his arms onto the countertop. He rests his cheek on his crossed forearms, slow-blinks, gazes up at you.</p><p>“Um.” You blush, let go of the mug. You reach for the lemonade. “Look, I just...want to say something.”</p><p>“Okay?”</p><p>“Um…” You pick it up and take a long drink; the sweet tang of it floods your mouth with saliva. “Grief is weird?”</p><p>His voice is hushed. “How do you mean?”</p><p>“I don’t...” You put the cup down. “Want to lecture you about how grief works, because I guess we’re all like…” You turn your head. “Experts now? I mean...that feels right, doesn’t it?”</p><p>“Yeah.” He nods, his voice sliding down to a half-whisper. “I guess it does.”</p><p>“But I just...” You let out a long broken sigh. You unfocus your eyes. Your lips tremble. “I-I wanted to say it’s…” You pull in a deep breath. “That it’s okay if you feel weird about or...or uh, regret?” You curl your hands around the mug of tea and pull it closer and a shiver wracks your spine. “If you have regrets? About...what happened.”</p><p>He sits up, curls his hair behind both ears. He looks at the countertop. “I don’t.”</p><p>“Or...o-or if you feel guilty about it, like…” Your eyes fill with sudden, hot, aching tears. “I mean it’s…” Your throat closes up. “It’s fine, I---”</p><p>He spreads his hands on the countertop, straightens his neck. His voice strengthens. “I don’t.”</p><p>“But it’s okay if you do,” you whisper.</p><p>“Frannie, she was---” He cuts himself off with a tight harsh sigh, sits all the way up, shakes his head. “It was, she was…” He squeezes his temples. “I don’t know what she was.”</p><p><em>There’s no need to explain yourself</em>, you think. <em>There’s nothing to solve, you’re not a riddle</em>.</p><p>“I-I mean...I knew her as a child, I loved her with a childish heart first and I guess I---” He slaps his hands on the countertop and takes a huge breath, his voice breaking. “Felt like I shouldn’t have to give that up, she was…”</p><p>“She was beautiful,” you murmur, watching the steam rise up out of your mug.</p><p>“Yes. But there’s more to it than that. It was more complicated than that.”</p><p><em>It wasn’t</em>. You lift the mug, take a delicate sip. <em>Culturally delineated beauty, with all of its baked-in promises and rewards, is a goddamned drug</em>.</p><p>“I mean that it <em>is</em> more complicated, I still feel like this, it was like…” He covers his face with his hands, grits his teeth. “She became this beacon of...cleanness.”</p><p>You look into the mug, watch the steam curl its way out. You hold it with both hands. Your voice is hushed. “Of whiteness, maybe.”</p><p>“I am aware of that.” Harold huffs and his voice trembles upward, turns thin and waspish. “Yes, I know she was this whole white girl ideal, I mean how could I not?” He loads a loud blast of breath with sharp disgust. “Who could miss that? She was the entire Barbie girl cheer captain package, if you want to make a cliché out of it. I’m not ignorant of all the ways that the semiotics of whiteness play out in American society.”</p><p>You take a drink and the tea warms your chest, your belly; it fills your head with a scent of summer.</p><p>He rubs his face, wipes underneath his nose. He glances at you. “And society is just a story we tell ourselves, after all.”</p><p>“Yeah.” You look in his eyes. You nod. “I guess that’s true now more than ever, huh?”</p><p>“I felt like…” Harold’s chin trembles. “I thought that…” He turns away, closes his eyes. “I feel so stupid saying this out loud, like...it sounds completely fucking inane in my head, but I think that...I felt like maybe, just…”</p><p><em>Like a knight from some old-fashioned book</em>, your mind whispers, your eyes flaming with hasty tears; you hold your breath, look down. <em>I have saved all my ribbons for thee</em>.</p><p>“Maybe,” he whispers, his eyes opening and glittering with tears, “if Frannie loved me, if I could make her love me somehow, win her over like---” He barks out a harsh laugh. “An old-fashioned knight in some kind of suburban courtly ideal that having her would...change me, that it would...wash me clean.”</p><p>Your sinuses throb and the wood gets blurry and you wipe your eyes, try to be quick but it feels furtive; you don’t look at him. You take a drink of tea, clutch the mug, clear your throat.</p><p>“Why would you need that, though?” You rub at your nose like it itches. “Why does a boy---or a man, for that matter---or anybody---need cleanness?”</p><p>“Getting a girl like Frannie means---a-and I know how that sounds, like she’s some kind of prized possession, it’s gross, but it’s the way we’re all taught to think.”</p><p><em>We have all tried, in our way, to be free</em>.</p><p>“It means manhood, I guess. Red-blooded American manhood. Real manhood, the kind my dad believed in, would recognize, something my mom might be proud of, something that guys I went to school with might…”</p><p>“Be jealous of?”</p><p>“That too, yeah, of course.” He snorts. “But...the phrase I was looking for is take seriously.”</p><p>“Harold…” You let go of the mug, keep your voice low. “That doesn’t come from a girl.”</p><p>“I know that now, but…” He snorts, shakes his head. “I didn’t know that yesterday.”</p><p>You watch the candlelight flicker across his profile. “Death is the great equalizer.”</p><p>“Yeah?” He snorts out a rusty little laugh. “Yeah.” He nods. “So is sex.”</p><p>“Well…” Your voice rustles in your throat, thin as worn-out taffeta. “It can be.”</p><p>There’s a draft somewhere, slight, and on its way through the kitchen it stirs the candle flames into a bobbing frenzy.</p><p>“I had this cousin, he was on my mom’s side, and he told me once---he was older than me and he was pretty Christian, I think he was trying to scare me away from premarital sex or something, I’m not sure, I’ve long since given up trying to parse out any sort of motivation on his part---he said that having sex with a girl is like breaking a window.”</p><p>Thin shadows dance all around. The wind slams into the walls of the house, makes them shudder.</p><p>“You build her all up in your head and it’s like this beautiful stained-glass church window, and that after a while you end up convincing yourself that this window is so magnificent because whatever’s in the church behind it is...the answer to everything, it’s the proverbial balm of Gilead, the key to all of life’s riddles.”</p><p>You shiver, take a slow drink of tea.</p><p>Harold blinks, the amber light moving through his eyelashes. You watch his face soften, smooth over; it fills with the stillness in a held breath and the beginnings of his smile tremble at the threshold between raw and radiant.</p><p>“But the trick of it is this, though---you’re the one who made the window, and the only way to get to whatever’s in the church behind it is to break it.”</p><p>Lightning flashes through the archway leading into the living room and you think of a camera’s flash, that split-second exorcism of all darkness in order to reveal one single image.</p><p>“Sometimes the window and what’s in the church are reflective of each other, or at least that was his theory, since people fall in love with each other and get married and all that, but most of the time you break the window and what’s behind it---sometimes it’s a huge letdown but most of the time it’s just…” He shrugs, stares off into an imagined distance. “Smaller than you maybe thought, and less colorful, and a lot more ordinary than you wanted it to be.”</p><p><em>So you did have sex with her</em>, you think, but you can’t force your breath to pass between your vocal cords on its way out of your body and your lips won’t move; <em>somewhere on the road it happened, maybe yesterday, just a little light intercourse between your roadside snack and her unfortunate murder</em>.</p><p>Harold looks at you.</p><p>The intensity of his gaze makes your hips squirm and your face get hot. You look at the mug instead, spin it around on the countertop.</p><p>“These are…” Your voice loses its strength. “Beautiful metaphors, Harold, but...I’m not sure of what you’re trying to say.”</p><p>His voice is husky and reverent. “Yes, you are.”</p><p>“I’m not.” Your scalp throbs heat and your spine stiffens and tension hums in your throat like an over-wound string. “I...I don’t want to think the wrong thing, so maybe you should just go ahead and solve all this ambiguity for me.”</p><p>“Well…” He blinks, struggles with the impatience in his voice. “What do you think it means?”</p><p>“That you fucked Frannie and it was some kind of a disappointment, which is fine---I mean, it’s none of my business, your life from before we met…” You breathe out through your nose. “Everything that might’ve happened between you…” Your voice loses its shakiness, gets louder. “All that is exactly…” You slam a hand down on the countertop. “None of my business, none at all, you don’t owe me anything.”</p><p>The sound of your hand striking the wood twitches his eyelids and jerks back through his neck, makes him blink; it startles him into a loose breath, into a huge smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes, softens his cheeks, and cracks through his trembling vulnerability.</p><p><em>Oh God just stop...stop it, I can’t with that look---put your gorgeous wreck of a face away</em>. You pull in a breath, choke the shiver out of it; you press your eyes shut, let out a slow breath through your nose. <em>Put it away because I have no control over myself, all that this day has been has made sure of it</em>.</p><p>He bursts out into buoyant, braying laughter.</p><p>Your eyes shut tighter. “I didn’t think anything I said was particularly humorous, Harold.”</p><p>“No, no, I’m sorry, I---” The wild quality of his laughter tames itself into ragged breath, slows into a quiet string of intermittent giggles.</p><p>His hand touches your face but you flinch, your eyes popping open. He nods, lets his hand drop, looks in your eyes.</p><p>“I’m not laughing at you, not really, I…” His fingers curl up on the counter close to yours. “I can’t help it, I’m sorry. The idea is just so absurd.” He laughs, shakes his head. “That it was just...a-a reflex.”</p><p>‘The idea of what is so absurd?”</p><p>“The idea of me having sex with Frannie.”</p><p>He snorts, that wild levity creeping back into his breath; it lightens his face and turns his smile huge and warm and dazzling.</p><p><em>Fuck</em>. It overwhelms your clenched and quivering lungs. The bottom drops out of your chest. <em>Oh fuck</em>.</p><p>“She wouldn’t let me touch her, let alone…” His words slow down and his eyebrows draw inward, his voice cracking apart. “That.”</p><p>“I’m sorry.” You look down, your voice weakening. “That must’ve hurt you.”</p><p>With one finger, he slides a lock of hair off your face.</p><p>Your breath catches, your neck swarming with gooseflesh.</p><p>“She was the window.” He runs his fingertip along your hairline, outlines the shape of your face. “But you---”</p><p>The huskiness in his voice, its crackling thrumming restraint, unlaces your spine; you let your breath out a little at a time and he slides long fingers through the roots of your hair. Your breath forces your lips apart. His chin trembles close to your forehead. Your breath quickens.</p><p>“Shhhhh.” Your voice is hushed. “Don’t say it.”</p><p>He makes a fist in your hair, tightens it, shakes your head; he clenches his teeth, speaks with an eviscerated growl. “But it’s true.”</p><p>Your thighs clamp over a sudden slithering red heat and a delicate shiver hums its way down your spine, makes you squirm. Gooseflesh cups your ribs. It tightens your nipples.</p><p>His breath hitches. He wets his lips. His fingers twitch and his voice softens into a raw, high-pitched tremulousness. “Is it better if I lie?”</p><p>You breathe hard, your lips shaping it out of the sound: no.</p><p>His breath backs up and he rubs his mouth across your forehead and his fist tightens; he buries his face in your hair. His voice is quiet, blurry, boyish: “Are you scared of me?”</p><p>“No.” Your body shudders, your lungs tightening just enough for you to whisper it. “I’m not.”</p><p>He nuzzles your hairline, kisses your temple. “Am I hurting you?”</p><p>“A little.” The constant patter of rain fills your mind with noise. “But…” Your belly shivers, hollows out until your guts drift loose; your cheeks fill with blood until they’re tight and throbbing with heat. “I-I like it,” you half-breathe, half-whimper.</p><p>“I’m afraid.” His fingers unclench one at a time and he swallows, tries to steady his breath. His words gush out in a soft and disjointed stream of heat. “Of doing the wrong thing all the time, of saying it, of being…” His lips move against your skin. “You can’t even imagine.”</p><p>Your heart thuds inside your chest. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“I don’t want you to feel---to feel like---” His hand drops, slides up underneath your sagging bun; his hot fingers curl around the base of your skull. “Like you have to…” He closes his eyes, swallows. His fingers tremble. “Make me happy, or stay with me, because of---” He heaves a huge sigh. “The way things happened.”</p><p>“What do you mean by…” You hold yourself as still as possible. “The way things happened?”</p><p>His hand tightens around your nape. He shakes. His voice cracks. “Don’t be dense.”</p><p><em>This is about the broken window</em>. Your stomach lurches and the inside of your chest thumps, the pulses in your neck throbbing.<em> Isn’t it?</em></p><p>“We haven’t spent a lot of time together but it’s been long enough for me to figure out that you’re smarter than this.”</p><p>“Okay.” Your eyes spill over and you nod. “Okay, Harold.”</p><p>“I…” His voice loses strength. “I wanted to kiss you in that field,” he half-breathes, “I wanted it so bad, but…” His jaws clench, his voice tightening. “I was too...goddamned <em>afraid</em>.” His voice wavers in and out of a brittle whisper. “I-I thought you’d laugh at me.”</p><p>“No,” you whisper. “No, no, I would never...I wanted it too, but I thought…”</p><p><em>It would’ve been dishonoring the dead, desecrating a haunted place, disrespecting flesh that wasn’t even cold, flaunting indifference to blood that had barely coagulated while whatever bonds that once held you two together breathed away their steam and melted away under the dimming sun into memory and mystery</em>.</p><p>“I might have begged you for it,” he murmurs, brings his mouth close to your ear. “Gotten down on my knees…”</p><p>A full-body shiver wracks your febrile bones. Tears well up, squeeze out the trembling corners of your shut eyes. “Stop,” you breathe.</p><p>“I would’ve.” His breath roughens into an irregular rhythm that could be desire or tears. “I would’ve ripped your clothes off and fucked you right there with the smell of her only an...a-an arm’s reach away.”</p><p>You put your hands on his soft clean dry hair, curl them around the shape of his skull, and he stiffens and jerks and his throat fills with the sound of snot-thickened breath; a slump passes down through his body, loosens it up, knocks the rapid wind out of his lungs.</p><p>His voice is weak, lost. “That makes me bad.”</p><p>“Then I’m bad too,” you half-hiss, “because I…I didn’t care, I wanted you like...like air, my chest ached for it, my whole body thirsted for your breath…” Your voice trails off into heavy breathing. “I wanted any part of you inside of me---anywhere---I would’ve taken anything.”</p><p>His silence is stunned, deafening; when he finds enough breath to speak, it’s in hushed velvet tones. “Really?”</p><p>“Yeah.” You let go of his head. “Yes, Harold.” You shrink back and turn away, your skin too hot, your joints filled with butterflies, your guts turned loose and throbbing with too much blood. You slide off the stool. Your thighs ache, the muscles straining at a memory of pain. “Really.”</p><p>“Wh---”</p><p>“Now that I’ve thoroughly humiliated myself.” The determination in your voice breaks down, wells up with tears. “I’m going upstairs.”</p><p>“Wait!”</p><p>“I don’t want to, Harold.” You wipe your raw and reddened eyes, walk toward the archway between the kitchen and the living room. “I still need to find something clean to change into, and get clean, and find a place to sleep.”</p><p>“I…” His lungs deflate. “Kay.” He subdues his voice. “I...uh, put some stuff aside for you, it’s in a little folded-up pile in the bathroom, I’m not sure about your sizes so...don’t be mad at me if nothing fits right.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t be, but thank you.”</p><p>“Since I was already looting.” He chuckles and it’s abrupt, high-pitched. He snorts. “I wasn’t going to leave you out.”</p><p>‘Thank you.” Your heart beats hard and fast; you’re lightheaded, you’re trying to keep your eyes off the living room’s shadow-shrouded shapes. “I appreciate that.”</p><p>“It’s...no problem, it’s my pleasure in fact.”</p><p>You put your hand on the smooth wooden railing and it’s cold, its polished surface sticky---<em>handled by whole families for stacks upon stacks of years, grimed-in generations of jam hands</em>---and haul yourself up and onto the stairs, out of the living room, you can still smell lingering hops and yeast and stale cigarette smoke, hear the blonde’s screeching muffled by a thick palm because she wouldn’t lie there and take it.</p><p><em>Hey Harold</em>, you think, your feet pushing you up and up through the ceiling, <em>you know what human skin smells like when a cigarette ember presses through it?</em></p><p>“I do, actually.” His voice is quiet and soft and hollowed-out.</p><p>You whip around, a cold bloom of adrenaline sinking tendril fingers into your belly; you find him standing at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the railing and silhouetted in thin unstable orange light.</p><p>You unseal your mouth with the tip of your tongue; your mouth is dusty-dry. “What did you say?”</p><p>“When I was in sixth grade…” Harold trails off.</p><p>You watch him and your hand goes to the slope of your left breast. Underneath, your heart’s gone wild; the frantic thud of it concusses the rush of your breath, knocks into your ribs, vibrates up the back of your throat.</p><p>“These guys would…” He looks down and his hair slides forward, hangs in curtains across his cheekbones. “Corner me in the first floor bathroom because it was hard to hear anything going on in there and it had windows, so it was where kids liked to sneak off to smoke.” He uses both hands to move his hair back, turns sideways. “It was close to summer, you know. The end of the year, and there’s no air conditioning in Maine schools so the classrooms get intolerable if it’s hot enough outside.”</p><p>You watch the skin glide over his smooth cheek hollows, one eye socket outlined in a thin gleam of reddened light, the movement of his jaw and mouth lost in the shifting dark; a memory flickers to life and already it feels like an artifact, a dusty fancy shaken free from the ashes of a decadent, far-flung civilization:</p><p><em>Can you hear me now?</em> That little guy in his horn-rimmed glasses, his thumb turned up, always resolute and so cheerful about it. <em>Good!</em></p><p>“Anyway.” Harold waves a hand, bows his long spine and leans into the wall. “The short version of this is that one day it was unseasonably hot so I thought wearing a tank top to school was a good idea.” His eyebrows lift and he shakes his head. “Which was dumb on my part.”</p><p>The image of the ad turns into water, flows into a crisp view of a public school bathroom: cinderblocks echoing, greened light filtered in through maple trees to make the air too bright, a window slanted open just wide enough for skinny hips to wriggle through. The acoustics are dull, like you have cotton jammed in your ears, but here’s a boy---big ears, narrow face, hair that’s since gone caramel-dark is still gold, still clings to baby cornsilk highlights---he’s bone-skinny and milk-white and hot pink across the shoulders, he’s wearing the kind of tank top you buy from a vendor on a pier.</p><p>“And some asshole thought it was the height of hilarity to yank down the back of my shirt and put his cigarette out on my back.”</p><p>The fit of the tank top is too loose, there’s not enough boy to fill it though his shoulders have started to widen, his collarbones lengthening, the shoulder blades prominent underneath freckled sunburned skin like embryonic wings dreaming of flight, the top is gaudy grape purple and bright blue and lemon yellow tie-dye screen printed with some kind of summertime fun logo on the front and he’s got a bookbag between his knees and he’s washing his hands---<em>bigger boys laugh like cattle, an ungainly bellowing good for shouting out a challenge and renewing terror but not much else</em>.</p><p>“The scar of it is down between the shoulder blades, so it doesn’t show in most shirts. But…” Harold straightens up, heaves a sigh. “Yeah, I do know what cigarette-burned skin smells like courtesy of Logan Lacasse, Wells Junior High’s premiere douchebag.”</p><p>“That’s…”</p><p><em>Terrible, I’m so sorry</em>.</p><p>You shake your head, fold your arms; your clothes are damp in spots rather than soaked through but your skin is too sensitive, the air is chilly, and you shiver.</p><p>“It’s another life, like...” Harold shrugs. “I don’t know if it's like this for you, but sometimes things from before, when I think about them, they feel like---what’s the word? Relic?”</p><p>“Artifact,” you half-whisper. “Like from a dig.” Your teeth chatter and you swallow, the walls of your throat sticking together. “An archaeological dig.”</p><p>“That’s it!” His white teeth flash in the gloom. “Artifact, relics are...something completely different.” He snaps his fingers, points at you. “Thank you.”</p><p>“It’s the living room, it still smells like cigarettes,” you murmur, rubbing your upper arms. “That’s...where the cigarette burns thought came from, the smell in here is everywhere, I don’t know if you notice, it’s like...coming up out of the upholstery and the humidity from rain doesn’t…” You voice trails off into a heavy sigh. “He---Garvey, I mean---used to burn girls who wouldn’t do what he wanted.” Your voice cracks and your spine-skin crawls. “Or if they screamed.”</p><p>Harold leans into the wall, holds himself in the gloom; he bends over his folded arms, doesn’t say anything.</p><p>“I do have a burn on me, before you ask me the question.”</p><p>“I wasn’t going to.” It bursts out in a thin, shivering rush.</p><p>“It’s---”</p><p>“Stop.” His voice strengthens, gets louder. “I don’t want to have to imagine it, it’s---”</p><p>“Too late?” you half-whisper. “Because you’re seeing it in your head, right?”</p><p>“No!” But there’s too much raw thrust in his voice, a blade that glints along the curve of his tongue. “It’s---”</p><p>Thunder mutters and you wait for the diminishing boom to roll off into a gust of wind. “Harold.”</p><p>His voice is subdued. “What?”</p><p>Lightning flashes, dances the curtain-shadows across the floor.</p><p>“Will you come upstairs with me?”</p><p>“Wait.” He goes still. “Do you…” He hesitates. “Do you mean---?”</p><p>“It means that I’m scared to be alone,” you murmur.</p><p>The candlelight shifts and you see the hard swallow bob in his throat and in the back of your mind, the movie of his childhood completes itself---it’s a Harold’s-eye view, you can see this football player-sized boy towering in the mirror; he’s got a black fringe of hair swinging and piggy pink lips that smirk and the bloom of pain makes Harold think <em>bee sting huh</em> and then there’s a wild leap of fear at the crisping ash smell, the feel of his skin tightening into needle-sharp pulsing rawness. The cinderblocks take Logan’s bellowing bullish guffaws at the way Harold’s nimble quick-trigger skeleton leaps up way ahead of his flesh to thunderous proportions; underneath all of this, wisping in a thin cloud-current like a polaroid picture whitening into overexposure, is a glimpse of his own face at the moment of ember kissing skin and he thinks <em>a rabbit why do i always look like a rabbit shitting itself in the middle of the fucking Maine Turnpike?</em></p><p>You shake your head, rub your eyes.</p><p>“But---”</p><p>“I want you,” you whisper.</p><p>Harold nods.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. built out of foraged stone</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Before you step into the bathroom, without thinking you slide a hand across the frame and grope across a swath of wall---<em>at home it was on this side, it was one of those wide flat switches they put in assisted living homes because they require no dexterity to operate</em>.</p><p>“Other side,” Harold whispers, reaching over your shoulder.</p><p>You glance sideways, watch his wrist turn. His fingers tap the wall and the switch clicks; the noise of it is loud in the hallway’s cavernous silence.</p><p>The overhead light blinks on, sudden and strong.</p><p>“There.”</p><p>Your breath jumps in your throat.</p><p>“It’s a little much I know, after months of candles…” His voice fades, brings a wave of heat into your hair. “And lamps, and flashlights.”</p><p>The smooth hard surfaces of the bathroom---the floor’s pink marble tiles, the wall’s dusky lavender ceramic tiles---amplify the noise of your feet, your stirred-up breath.</p><p>“Do you want me to wait out here?” Harold lowers his voice and his hands find your shoulders, cup them; he skims them down your upper arms. “Sit the watch and guard the door, so to speak?”</p><p>Gooseflesh erupts across the plains of your skin, sends cascades of tiny hot shivers down your spine. You nod and the t-shirt is too rough; underneath it your hairs stiffen, your nipples ache. “Have you---”</p><p>“Locked everything? Yes.” He squeezes you, lets his overheated hands fall. “Both doors and all the windows.” He turns sideways, slides in the rest of the way. “I did all of that while you were sleeping.”</p><p><em>While You Were Sleeping</em>, you think, watching him move through the room, <em>isn’t that a movie title? Wasn’t it, once upon a time?</em></p><p>He snorts a soft, half-breathed chuckle.</p><p>
  <em>Except in that movie it was the man who slept.</em>
</p><p>This light, so hard and foreign after weeks of firelight and gaslight, following necessary darkness and the primitive kindness of combustion, is vicious: it carves black shadow out of the hollows of his eyes, lays the white gleam of an axe blade along the bridge of his nose, pulls the knobs of his vertebrae out of his nape and rings them with ash. A scattering of pink patches underneath his jaw, where his razor took a little too much skin, glow bright on his white skin like broken berries in milk, like heel-scraped rose petals.</p><p>
  <em>While the woman spun a whole beautiful tale of passionate romance out of...well, nothing.</em>
</p><p>Harold pulls open a cabinet with his long hands and takes out a folded pair of fluffy towels; they’re white, embellished with the same shade of pink as the bathroom tile.</p><p>“I put the clothes I found over there.” He points to a laundry basket. “There’s a selection, it was the best I could do.”</p><p>You nod. “Okay.”</p><p>“I just left the soap and shampoo and stuff in there.” He glances at you, a one-sided smile hovering in his face. “I figured...you know.”</p><p>“Yeah.” You feel your mouth finding the shape of a smile; it does it before you have a chance to think about it, obeying instead the hot feeling caught in your chest. “Okay.”</p><p>Harold pauses, half-turned to the door; he keeps his eyes on your face, keeps his spine soft. “Do you want me to leave you?”</p><p>“I…”</p><p>You’re hot-faced and formulating an answer, flailing through all the half-formed images in your mind when your eyes shift. They land on the bathroom window; it’s rectangular and small, standard for an old-school bathroom, high-up and framed in pretty pink curtains. Its shade is still half-drawn.</p><p><em>Light</em>.</p><p>You blink and your mind drains until there’s just blackness, a smooth velvety silence cradled by warmth and proximity---it’s stunned into hibernation, pulls all thought-light into itself, waits for your body to wake up and wrestle it out of dream.</p><p>Before the words can form, the flavor of them floods you. A throat-cracking dry taste, savory and eye-watering---and then a flickering image finds its way into your holding pattern, dissolves it, gobbles it up: you see a scattering of stars across a black night, a spray of light as gossamer as fog and caught in jeweled webs and held close to the black breast of the night.</p><p>In this place the dry air shatters at the movement of a single breath, greedy for all the humidity that happens inside a body. There’s a long hot wind, it moans over hidden cracks and hollows, smells like water whitened into salt, like the high bitter oil of sweating creosote shrubs, like a secret memory of dark honey. Each individual star glitters with its own savage white light, tiny white shards of it furring the rims of blinding pinprick holes, stinger-sharp and stuck to the tender field of your vision.</p><p>Your eyes long for droplets of cold, mountain-reaped water. Your nostrils constrict. Your lungs crackle and burn. You open your mouth and it billows mesquite; your lips cup silent shapes and the words wisp into being, fatten their bellies with curls of fragrant smoke: <em>fire light</em>.</p><p>A vision flashes into place, holds still just long enough for you to read it: the land languishing beneath this raiment of unkind stars is a desert land, its lungs huge and sharp and unpolished, its powdered soil too dry for mercy---all its creatures are low creatures, brimful with venom and indifferent to a softer life; all its flowers bear thorns, beckon you closer before demanding a fresh offering of blood-drops as their price for taking drunkenness, for daring to purse lips and sip at their opium scent---but the stark beauty there cuts all the way through the crust of your land, finds your darkest hollows. It sings rhyming verses to your hot heart, the hidden parts of you always hovering on the brink of ash and ready to puff away in a bright burst of blood orange sparks.</p><p>In this vision, a tall fire enwombed within this vast sprawl of empty space.</p><p>There’s a glut of red light dancing, dancing. Flames take up shadows and whirl them around, dress them in blinking rubies and shattered topaz, do reels, flash voluminous skirts at the wind.</p><p>And---</p><p><em>Harold</em>.</p><p>The light is ravenous for him. It chases the shadows off his skin and drapes his long ropy limbs in copper orange, yellowing brass, scintillating ripples of saffron; it ambers the high curves in his cheeks, runs flickering and covetous red tones along the long bones of his fingers. It hammers his collarbones full of gold. It coaxes his sweat into tiny crystals of browned honey, takes each rib in hand and lays hot carnelian kisses up each curve, around each bend.</p><p>It sets a tiny Viking funeral adrift in the luminous black pupil of each eye.</p><p>Forms of his nose a duned, drift-framed temple.</p><p>His lips bloomed red and soaked to the edges, his tongue the rosy coil of a red-bellied snake, his mouth and throat a dark hot reservoir.</p><p>The shadows find their way in. They ignore him, spurn his indifferent elegance for you; they find your ribs so slippery, so loose, that it’s easy to pry them open and well your lungs full. A wild wave of strength twists up into your muscles. It swells them, casts handfuls of tremors at your tendons, packs them to bursting; your bones lock, ache at their frantic throb.</p><p>Harold puts the towels on top of the clothes. It makes a sound like collapse, yards of fabric swooning into dust.</p><p><em>Like the price of Icarus’s taunts gliding up toward the sun</em>.</p><p>He throws a look over his shoulder. “What?”</p><p>You want to speak but your mouth won’t move; your tongue freezes, your ribs spasming around your lungs.</p><p>You still smell the spicy smoke. It clings your nostril-hairs, mouth-watering and full of terror.</p><p>Harold glances at you.</p><p>The room around you contracts. You squint and the air on your skin sighs you back to the moment; you find your legs shivering and your joints loosened, your skin soaked in sweat, your throat is raw. You’re shaking.</p><p>He whirls around. He goes still at the look on your face and blinks several times and his eyes widen; his jaw flexes, goes still as stone.</p><p>“I think…”</p><p>Harold keeps his eyes on your face. He lowers his arms, drops his voice. He turns the rest of the way around, his hips canted, one flexed leg oriented in your direction; his whole body is arched, stretched into balance. He’s so catlike that for a single hot second you think he might leap, might bare his teeth and topple you over, might take you down.</p><p>“What is it?” His voice is hushed, reverent.</p><p><em>I know it, I know that look</em>---you fixate on what the rain is doing to it, the warp and weft, a new reality knotting into place---<em>goddamn it say what you mean, you know controlled firelight when you see it.</em></p><p>It’s still raining, the water gushing out of a storm-bruised sky. It cascades down the glass and ripples everything on the other side of it into swells and curves but there’s a source of distant light for it to smear, orange and weak, seeping through the rain-needled dark from the direction of where you remember an old barn; falling down, two storeys, grayed-out wood at the farthest edge of the broad back field <em>but there’s no light anywhere now no electricity Jesus we must be a beacon up here with all this bright manufactured blinding light---</em></p><p>“Someone’s camping in the barn,” you half-whisper.</p><p>Harold’s neck stiffens and the bright red patches in his face drain away. His eyes flare open. His mouth trembles. His throat tightens, thins out his voice. “What?”</p><p>“Look.” You point at the window. “You can see their firelight through the rain.”</p><p>He hurries over and puts the tip of his nose on the glass.</p><p>“If I turn the light off…”</p><p>“Yes, go do that.” His voice is dry and tight, crackling and fragile. “Please.”</p><p>You nod and break out of your paralysis enough to lunge at the doorway, slap the switch; your body loosens, your skin detached and feverish. The room falls out of light. It swoons into a deep velvet rain-sung black and the window’s wet glass brightens the thin scrap of orange light, takes it up, makes it bigger; it’s scattered across thinning currents, hangs dim sparks in still droplets.</p><p>You listen to Harold’s breath in the dark, the broke-winged ferocity of it, how it echoes through his body’s hollows and you move closer to him, your own lungs itching at his rhythm and thirsting for the ballast of entrainment. Your hand finds him and his body jolts within its skin; your palm reads his angles of bone, slithers its way around the channel of his thin waist.</p><p><em>He’s hot as fire underneath his clothes</em>, you think, the words themselves dizzy and hard to catch. <em>The seams a half-breath away from smoldering, he’s gone all a-crackle and ready to leap</em>.</p><p>His long arm winds around your shoulders until you’re up tight against him, pressed flank-to-flank.</p><p>“I see it too,” he whispers.</p><p>The erratic swelling rhythms of your breath push and pull at one another.</p><p>“I don’t think they can hear us,” you whisper back, your heart slamming into the meat of your sternum.</p><p>“I swear I…” His spine clicks into a long straight edge. His muscles wind into coils; his breath quickens, scrapes up over his tongue, deepens his voice. “I didn’t see anything like that when---when y-you were---when I was---”</p><p>“Of course you didn’t.” You rush the words out, use them to smother the trailing in his voice. “It was dark, raining like hell, and…”</p><p>You wrap both arms around him in the dark and his breath flounders, the stacked staves of his ribs gone stilted and rickety with it.</p><p>“Shhhh, please don’t---don’t get angry.” You bring your mouth on his chest, press the heat of your breath into his skin; you murmur the words like water. “It’s okay if you---if you didn’t see it, I don’t know if I would...there was…”</p><p>“But---”</p><p>“You had a lot to get done,” you whisper, your fingers playing up the long valley of his spine. You nudge the gap between his collarbones with your forehead. “And you were busy.”</p><p>Harold’s arms go tight around you, mouth descending into your hair; his breath hitches, yanks all the bones of him. He shudders your name. His voice breaks like a branch across the thrum of its own tension.</p><p>You squeeze him, let your voice go to a whisper. “It’s okay.”</p><p>“I---”</p><p>You make your voice loud as a storm or a threat: “Shhhhh.”</p><p>“I locked everything up.” His voice clears with a cough, trembles around the edges. “Like I said.”</p><p>You put your ear against his chest. You close your eyes and grab handfuls of his shirt, fill your head with the wild thunder of his heart. “I believe you.”</p><p>“They have to know we’re here, we...” He barks out a short, ragged laugh. “Haven’t been exactly subtle about it, I mean…” He flits both hands through his hair, snorts out a breath. His voice roughens. “Fuck.”</p><p>“I’m sure they do.” Thunder rolls somewhere far away. “We’re why they’re here, I think.”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“They must’ve seen the headlights,” you murmur. “Or the windows lighting up, or even the candles, and decided to stay close by but not approach because it’s storming, and it’s dark, and…”</p><p><em>We’re dangerous</em>. Your heart stumbles, runs faster, starts to flutter; you grew up a pacifist, you’d never started a fistfight or put a hand to any kind of weapon until the world made you do it but it feels true just the same: <em>there’s danger for them here, it lives somewhere between us, a potential threat planted and already growing. Our pairing is a mutation, or a structural flaw, or a ticking time bomb</em>.</p><p>“We might react in hostile ways,” Harold muses.</p><p>You swallow. “Yes.”</p><p>“That’s wise.” His voice flattens, goes into a mumble. “It’s very wise indeed.”</p><p>“Harold…”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Your heartbeat fills your ears, drowns out the rain. “They’re being very respectful, if you want think about it.”</p><p>“You’re not wrong.” Harold blows out a breath, shrugs a shoulder. “They must know we’re here, any light source radiates for...for miles in the natural dark, and even though they could...especially if it’s a group.” He shakes his head. “They haven’t approached us at all, haven’t done---”</p><p>“Anything,” you murmur. “Anything at all.”</p><p>“Except advertise their presence through fire.” He kisses the top of your head. “But...there’s not much of a way to avoid that.”</p><p>“No,” you sigh. “It’s cold and wet.”</p><p>“And very dark.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Harold rubs your back and you shiver, your cheeks burning; you close your eyes even though it’s dark enough in the bathroom to mimic the tides of sleep and you try to imagine them: a camp made in a barn, tents or sleeping bags or just rough blankets on a dirt floor and scattered around a fire ring built out of foraged stones.</p><p><em>Dragged out of a nearby stone wall</em>, your mind whispers. <em>Drawn and quartered into a new life.</em></p><p>White smoke puffing from whatever crackling wood they could find, twigs snapping, sparks colliding with raindrops and sizzling out---some clouds of it would escape into the rain, but the rest would drift up through chinked boards and cobwebs to congregate along the beams and drowse, drape vaulted space with eddies of thick atmosphere.</p><p>
  <em>Eyes stinging. Lungs irritable and spasming out dry coughs. That bitter but savory smell climbing into everything and snuggling down, tucking in, reminiscent of warm winters and blackened ruin.</em>
</p><p>“Do you think we should...do something? Bring out an olive branch?”</p><p>“You mean…” Harold’s voice thickens, cracks with contempt. “Go out there?”</p><p>“Well...yeah.” You pull back. “What did you think I meant?”</p><p>“Why would we want to do that?”</p><p>“Because it’s a nice thing to do? Because it’s civilized? I don’t know, I mean...what if they don’t have any food?” You shrug. “There’s plenty here to go around.”</p><p>“So what if they don’t?” He scoffs. “And what if they’re...bad people? I’d think you’ve had enough of being raped.”</p><p>“Fuck you, Harold.” You shove him away. “God!”</p><p>“What?” He stumble-steps away and his voice sharpens, crackles a little; it climbs an octave. “You think there was only one rapist left behind in this brave new world?” He sneers, flings a hand at the window. “You don’t know! I don’t know! For all we know there’s a whole encampment of guys like...l-like---”</p><p><em>Garvey</em>.</p><p>“Yes, thank you,” Harold snaps, clears his throat. “Him.”</p><p>You flinch.</p><p>“There could be a whole camp of Garveys out there in that barn.” He’s panting. “A kind of...o-of roving sadistic nightmare circus of zookeepers, just waiting for the opportunity to add another woman to their collection.”</p><p><em>He called us that</em>, you turn your head to watch the rain slap the window glass and listen to Harold’s lungs tear up the dark, <em>the zoo, because we were animals to him. Not even wives or concubines or odalisques or some other pretty word dug up out of history but...hot holes, ready to eat, just add fear. What do you call the life support system for a pussy? A woman, don’t you get it, har har har now there’s a knee-slapper straight outta my great-grandma’s time, and here’s another joke for you: there is no time, not anymore, all the timekeepers and watch-setters and cartographers of such things as generations and ages and eras turned purple and swelled up and choked to death on their own snot. They took all resemblance to civilization with them and now there’s no one to stop a wannabe zookeeper. Those guys? Instead of handing down prison sentences or debating laws in DC, they’re pushing up daisies.</em></p><p>You lay a hand over the wild thrash of your heart, let it ride the rise and fall of its cage; the firelight at the other side of the land waxes and wanes, but it stays steady on.</p><p>The thought is terrifying.</p><p>The thought is exhilarating.</p><p>“But for all <em>we</em> know,” you say, turning toward the noise of his breath, your voice climbing up over his, “there could be a bunch of cold scared children huddled down there, Harold. Kids.”</p><p>“Yeah, well.” The words come out clipped and dripping with disdain. “Wishful thinking will get us nowhere.”</p><p>“Wishful…” Your eyebrows lift. “<em>Thinking</em>?” Your mouth opens and closes again, your neck straightening; you stiffen, fold your arms. “Okay, so…” Your restless hips jerk to one side. “I have an idea that’s different from yours, and that all it takes to make it <em>wishful thinking</em>?”</p><p>“There is no reason to believe that they’re children. None.”</p><p>“Well Harold there’s no reason to believe they’re a bunch of escaped convicts, either, but...wow, look at you go!”</p><p>“I think it’s a lot more reasonable to deduce the latter, given that children aren’t exactly known for their exquisitely developed frontal cortices.” His voice is hushed but heated. “Do you really think a bunch of kids are going to show this level of...o-of---”</p><p>“Craftiness?”</p><p>“Well,” he snorts. “I was going for caution, but I can roll with craftiness.” His voice is crisp, sardonic. “I mean, it’s got a great beat and I can dance to it.”</p><p>You snort, clap a hand over your nose and mouth; you struggle against the urge to burst out laughing, swallow it down.</p><p>“What?” Harold’s voice is sharp.</p><p>“I’m sorry.” Soft chuffing giggles leak out between your fingers; your body shakes with mirth. Your chest hurts. Your eyes flood with hot, hysterical tears. “I know you don’t mean to be funny, but…”</p><p>“It was not meant to be funny, no...you’re right about that.” His voice remains stern but it cracks a little. “I don’t think safety is a laughing matter.” He holds his breath for a half-second, then snorts out a long bray of jagged laughter. “I sound like I have a giant stick up my ass, don’t I?”</p><p>“Yeah,” you giggle, nodding. “The whole tree.”</p><p>“Oh great, so...what you’re saying is that I sound exactly like my father.” He’s snickering. “Fuckin kill me, Jesus.”</p><p>“Yeah...well.” You wipe your streaming eyes. “Jesus has checked out, I’m afraid.”</p><p>He giggles.</p><p>“Along with Buddha, Mohammed, Yahweh, and whoever else.” You sniffle and wipe your cheeks, rub at your nose. “I think Shiva’s probably still around, though. I mean...Destroyer of Worlds, and all that.”</p><p>Harold’s hand---high-strung and still hot, tight as the silky skin of a peach---slides up over the junction of your collarbones.</p><p>“I like the way that feels,” he murmurs, stroking your throat with his thumb. The softness of it, his gentle hesitation, strikes sparks down your spine. “That...vibration, that rhythm of you laughing.”</p><p>Your breath backs up into a trembling halt and your mouth waters and you slide your hand over the back of his; he leans in and his mouth finds yours, the shape of his lips bumping and grazing and giving wet to the way you keep opening and opening even though you don’t want to---<em>but you</em> do <em>want to</em>---and in the dark behind your lids that sun-slanted moment in the field comes back so hard it’s like being punched from the inside: you smell it, interlaced with wet bathroom smells, the dry grass and stilled blood and the cool sticky tingle of pine sap.</p><p>That road-not-taken conforms itself to you in the dark, its despairing breath hot and unstable between his palm and your pulse; he takes sudden hold of your neck and yanks you, fumbles a wet and desperate kiss onto your panting lips.</p><p>Goose pimples flood your body; they take apart your spine, eating you and flashing your red blood on their way down to the bone. Your gut fills with a burning that steals all of your oxygen and all the water lurking in your flesh, an interior ocean with a perfect memory, abandons the task of holding you up. It rushes your lowest point.</p><p>You loosen his hand, tug it off you.</p><p>Harold’s hands gather up your thighs.</p><p>Your knees squeeze together.</p><p>He grins into your mouth, utters a soft laugh.</p><p>The tapping of the rain eases in, echoes around the pounding throb of your heart. Your bones feel hollowed out, packed full of embers.</p><p><em>My skin’s baking hot, I am a dark desert field deep into a summer night</em>, you think and an image flashes across your mind, quick and unstable as lightning: the blackened bones of a fire strewn over rocks by a desert wind, the long backs of cactus-ridden mountains roasted into a brassy gold by a bleached sky---<em>letting the long hard love of the day’s vicious sun drift back up to the stars...but opening those arms slowly, watching it go reluctantly, the way a mother watches the backs of her children disappear into an uncertain future.</em></p><p>“No,” your breath rushes past his lips, “I’m not gonna do this…” You swallow, shake off the rising sweat. “Again.”</p><p>Harold kisses under your ear. “You’re going to have to pardon me if I don’t feel like gambling your life away.” His fingers spider-crawl your hips, cup them closer. “So sorry,” he murmurs into your skin. “I guess I’m just an asshole, right?” His lips land on the roundest part of your cheek. “That’s me, I guess.” He holds your face, brushes a quick kiss across your lips. “I’m the biggest prick on the planet for giving a shit.”</p><p>“Get out,” you mutter, pushing him away. “I need to take a shower.”</p><p>“What? Really?” He lets go of you. “Are you gonna be mad at me for wanting to...to look out for you?” His voice is tender. “For thinking of you?”</p><p>“No, I mean---yes, of course you have a point, and no, I’m not going to be mad about that, but…” You sigh. “It’s the low-hanging fruit of points.”</p><p>“Rude.”</p><p>“If by rude you mean uncomfortably true? Yeah, probably.”</p><p>“Fine, I will…” He heaves a dramatic sigh. “Concede to your point.” His voice is dry. “Are you happy now?”</p><p>You smile in the dark. “Ecstatic.”</p><p>Harold snorts.</p><p>“It could be dangerous, you’re right.” You look out the window, keep your voice soft and even. “And you are not an asshole for thinking of me, or for wanting to do that, or keeping in mind all the ways in which the world has changed, but...what if you’re wrong?” You turn toward the sound of his breath. “What if they need help?”</p><p>“How…” His voice is thin, crumbly. “But how do you propose we help, huh?” His breath hitches. “What exactly do we have to give? There’s food, and some basic medicine, but beyond that---what, huh?” The lower registers of his voice drop into a raw scratchy hiss. “Are either of us doctors? Or nurses, even?”</p><p>“No,” you half-whisper.</p><p>“Meanwhile they could just...shoot us before we even got all the way there, and then take all of our stuff...I mean, it’s---”</p><p>Breath explodes out of him in a harsh, scoffing sigh.</p><p>“Could you not scoff at me?” It bursts out of you, crackling and sullen. “Please?”</p><p>“Yeah, I’m...” Harold lets out a soft breath. “Sorry about that.”</p><p>You reach out. “It’s okay.”</p><p>“I guess...just let me start over, okay?”</p><p>Your hand finds his forearm, strokes it. “Okay, sure.”</p><p>“I want to say that it’s that kind of world <em>now</em>, after Captain Trips, but...it was always that kind of world, we didn’t know any better, we were too busy being fooled by America’s pretty clothes and her nice upper-class teeth and her big blonde Barbie girl hair. We were all brought up that way---primed to get dazzled by all of her pretty sparkly lies about how things are and who we are and what we’re capable of being, but---”</p><p>Harold pulls his arm out of your loose grip, glides away.</p><p>“The truth is that when you strip away all the knick-knacks and the sugary language and the bedazzled disposable lifestyle shit---and I’d say the Trips has done a bang-up job of that, wouldn’t you?”</p><p>You watch his silhouette form across the window’s shape. “Yeah.”</p><p>“Once all that shit is gone, all that’s left behind for all of us is this: hell is other people, and there is nothing one human being won’t do to another.”</p><p>“But you’re another person.” You look at the shape of him, outlined by thin rain-bent light. “Are you hell?”</p><p>Harold’s shoulder-shape twitches.</p><p>“I mean...I don’t think so.” You approach him, gentle your voice. “Am I?” Your hand reaches up, rests over the aggressive skin-stretched architecture of his shoulder. “Is that what I am to you, Harold?”</p><p>“No!” He flinches, his skin too-warm and smelling of fabric softener; his voice is as fresh and raw as a reopened wound. “Of course not!”</p><p>“They’re individuals too, down there. Out in that barn, just trying to live. Like us. Other hells or heavens or somethings in between.”</p><p>“I don’t want to share you.” His voice is thin, fluttery as fine silk.</p><p>Your fingers spasm on him and his head twitches toward the curve of your hand and you pull in a deepening breath, your guts trembling into knots, a heavy cold ache skirting the rim of your pelvis before shuddering its way down into the long muscles of your thighs. Your lungs well up with tension, turn your breath shallow.</p><p><em>I believe that</em> you think and <em>I know</em> and <em>I don’t</em>---the sentence riding that edge but refusing, coming up short against the quick brick wall erected between you and the deeper parts of yourself.</p><p>“But you have to,” you whisper, moving your mouth close to his shoulder blade. “It’s outside my control, all humans have to be with other humans, even if only briefly, even if only to get needs met, I…”</p><p>
  <em>Might be willing to be alone with you forever but it’s not about whether or not I will it, I’m sorry.</em>
</p><p>Harold’s shoulders twinge, yank themselves into a tightrope-humming stiffness; his back stiffens pole-straight and by the way his breath shallows, by the tight thinness of his voice, you know it before he speaks it:</p><p>“I didn’t.” He swallows. “Say anything.”</p><p><em>Out loud</em>.</p><p>He turns. In the moving rain-lashed dark, his eyes widen until his darkened irises rim themselves with cold ivory.</p><p>“Yeah,” you whisper, searching his eyes. “You just had a thought.” Your breath quickens. “And I heard it.”</p><p>Harold reconsiders your face, his forehead creasing and pushing his eyebrows into a glowering frown. “That can’t---”</p><p>“But it is.” You watch his forehead twitch toward an angrier expression and then slacken, his mouth trembling back and forth between a sneer and a hesitant rictus. “It’s true, you did it to me on the stairs, I…” You glance at his softened and anguished eyes, look past him, watch the water slide down the window glass. You sigh, look down. “I would never have said that thing about the cigarette burns out loud.”</p><p>He blinks rapidly, shakes his head. His mouth opens. He looks down and a red flush darkens his lips, floods his cheeks with hot pink; his mouth closes and his nostrils tremble and he looks at you, his gaze hard and poisonous and aching. A thin gleaming rind of water gathers along his bottom lashes.</p><p>“I’ll show you where mine is,” you half-whisper, keeping your eyes on his. “I mean that I could show you, but...you already know,” you whisper, reaching up to wipe his tears. “Don’t you?”</p><p>Harold’s chin trembles, his eyes filling all the way up; he blinks, sends fat rivulets of wet down his sharp hot cheeks. His damp nostrils twitch and he bites his lip, nods, it’s a motion so light and fast that’s a vibration. Long chunks of hair shiver around his face.</p><p>“It’s---”</p><p>He gulps a strangled half-whisper, closes his eyes; he marshals his breath, opens his eyes and they’re half-drowned. He lifts his hand and touches the worn cotton of your t-shirt, feels between your breasts.</p><p>“It’s here,” he whispers, circling its hard raised curve.</p><p>It doesn’t hurt anymore but your body tenses up, fights to control your breath.</p><p>“It’s right here, I...” His voice shivers into a higher pitch, cracks. “I heard...y-you scream,” he stammers, pushing both hands through his hair. His breath stumbles. “In my head, you...” He digs the water out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. His voice thins into a shaky whisper. “Sounded so scared, like...a-a trapped animal.”</p><p>“That’s because I was a trapped animal,” you whisper.</p><p>Harold flinches.</p><p>“I woke up a trapped animal.” Your voice gains strength. “But I will go to bed a free human being.”</p><p>He sniffles, wipes his cheeks.</p><p>“But first I need a shower, okay?”</p><p>He nods.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>harold is 18 in this fic; i'm sorry, i just cannot take owen teague seriously as a 16-year-old</p></blockquote></div></div>
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